Our table is the red of a ripe persimmon, and it sits on our back deck surrounded by our unruly garden. My partner Mike made it using an old door from a good friend’s bach in Rotoiti. The orange paint is peeling off in the most perfect way, exposing pink and green layers underneath.
Like all good tables, it is the heart of our family, and it is used for almost everything we do. We eat outside any time it isn’t raining. Even in the winter this table is often covered with food and surrounded by people we love. The homemade bench seats, old wooden chairs (some from Ponsonby flat days) and lately an interesting cinder-block and macrocarpa-offcut installation, are pulled up and we all gather around to eat and talk.
We are gardeners so it also gets used as a potting-up bench, and seed-sorting and flower-arranging table. My daughter proudly displays arrays of her carrots, and it’s the ideal backdrop for photographing the dahlias as they show off their colours.
It is a seasonal table – this photo is from Matariki last year, when the kids made paper lanterns with candles, and I made a fire on the back lawn with a simple circle of rocks. Our dear friends and family gathered, then we ate in the night garden and looked at the stars framed with white tree dahlias.
It is a table that hears many stories. It’s where I catch up with friends over cups of tea to talk about the hard parts of life or laugh over a glass of wine at the end of a long week. There is often a cat on the table and a dog under the table, and kids doing homework or drawing while we potter in the garden. Mike and I have five kids between us ranging from 12 to 21.
Making a new life together as a big family takes work, and as rich and filled with love as life is, we still had to figure out a place to start. When I think back, I realise this old door has held us in a way I never appreciated – it is the centre of us.
Zoë Carafice landscape studio
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