At Smith Farms, we build a wide variety of custom furniture pieces, but one of the most popular types of furniture requested by our customers is custom dining tables. A great dining table can really make a statement in a home, based purely on its size! It’s typically one of the largest pieces of furniture you’ll have in your home, and often in a prominent location. This makes a dining table a great candidate for a custom-designed piece!
Ever since the “great room” became a trend in home design starting in the late 1990s/early 2000s, dining tables have generally become more casual in style—less like the “fancy” dining room table you may have had when you were younger, or that your grandparents had in their home when you were growing up. This is because dining tables are now often in the main living space of the home. In most modern homes, a dining table is no longer off in a side room, and used just for eating dinner. Instead, it is often the furniture piece families use when they work from home, do their homework, play games, do art projects, as well as eat their meals.
But just because a dining table is heavily used, doesn’t mean it needs to look utilitarian. It can still be a beautiful piece that helps bring style to a home. Wood selection is key. If you know your dining table will get a lot of use, you want to make sure it’s built out of a hardwood that doesn’t dent or scratch easily.
Here at Smith Farms, we happen to really love a good live-edge dining table. We believe a custom live-edge dining table, made from one or more slabs of hardwood, can be the perfect piece to add style to your great room or dining room. Live-edge tables provide instant visual interest due to their natural, organic shape, which is different than your standard dining table. The live edge can either be on the inside or the outside of the table, and can be dramatic or subtle, based on the slab(s) you choose.
The great thing about live-edge dining tables is that no one else will have a table like it. You can hand-select the exact slab(s) you want your table built out of. We have multiple slabs in stock—ready to go—or we can source whatever type of wood you have in mind. Most of the time, we use domestic species of wood, such as Oak, Walnut, Maple, Ash, or Cherry, but we can certainly get more exotic slabs if that’s what you’re looking for!
A typical dining table is 24-45” wide and 5-10’ long, but we can design a table for your home in any size you want. That’s the beauty of working with a custom furniture company—you can get the exact shape and size that will work in your space! We will also build a custom base for your dining table. It can be made from wood, or we can work with a local metalworker to craft a custom steel base.
We would love to talk with you about all of the options available for your custom, live-edge dining table! Contact us at Smith Farms and we’ll get right back to you to discuss your project!