I always imagined my family table to be a big old wooden table with grooves and dents – forgiving and inviting with all of its lumpy history, a bit like the one I grew up with, which had originally been in a school.

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Our family table is cobalt blue. It is perfectly straight with steel legs, a Melteca top and a narrow band of timber clashing. Just to alleviate its blueness.

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We ordered it from IMO not long after we moved into our home four years ago. The old table was wooden, mid-century and round: that felt wrong in the room, and too brown. We thought about white, but that felt too cold. Eventually we thought, fuck it, let’s make it blue.

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The IMO team not only delivered the table but meticulously checked that everything was exact. The irony is that it sits on the oldest wooden floor with such an extreme slope, that you can play marbles on it.

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It is in the centre of the house, next to the fire – the old wonky walls are a bluey gray, and we have some green chairs and some, ah, enthusiastic art. There’s quite a bit going on in the room. You would think the blue would be bright and hard to live with but at some point, it just started to soften, fit in. The blue has become weirdly neutral.

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We eat around it, work on it, and many crafting experiments get stuck to it. We’ve changed the chairs a couple of times and used different dinner plates, which all work with the blue.

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I’m not sentimental about things. I like to change our house, and often. My partner is the opposite, and hangs onto anything (including our old dining chairs, which are under the house “just in case”.) We often chat about whether we will change the table out when we do The Renovation, but I don’t think we can now.

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The table has become the centre of our lives. It is building up its own memories, its own stories. It has its first dent, from a rough-cast vase that we shouldn’t have put on there. I think it’s fair to say it’s staying.

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