Winged Victory

Sara Szyber’s innovative drop-leaf table is a triumph of function and form.

One of the highlights at the most recent edition of the Maison et Objet trade fair in Paris was the Design House Stockholm (www.designhouse2.com) exhibit, which featured the work of talented Swedish designers such as Sara Szyber, who has been developing products for the company since 1996. Here she talks about her 1996 Wing drop-leaf table, which is now available for the first time in North America.

I wanted it to be very flexible. It can be used as a worktable or you can seat many people for dinner at it. With both leaves down, it’s just one foot wide.

I wanted the table to be very functional but at the same time expose its materials and structure. The challenge was to make it as thin as possible yet sturdy and use only the materials absolutely necessary.

One detail I worked on quite a bit was to have the legs that support the leaves hidden behind the legs that support the basic table structure when the leaf is dropped down.

I wanted to call it Jasper, but Anders Färdig, president of Design House Stockholm, named it Wing because the drop leaves on either side of the table are like a bird’s wings.

In the beginning we were planning to have a small cutlery storage tray in the drawer, but it wasn’t produced in the final version. You can use the drawer to store napkins and tablecloths or anything you want.

I had the idea to create a drop-leaf table, but I wanted it to have a drawer that would slide underneath and could be pulled from either side.

The table is made of solid birch. It will be available in white and eventually in teak.

The idea for this table came out of an inspiring summer course I did with Jasper Morrison in 1992, where I had the idea to design items that we felt were missing from the home. This was in the beginning of the cocooning era and the trend toward compact homes.

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