What size dining table do I need?

Almost everyone begins by measuring the table. The measurement that settles it is the floor left around the table — and there is one number to carry: about 90 cm of clear space on each long side. What follows is that number, worked through against real footprints and real prices.

The one number, and the subtraction it sets up

The sizing guide on every product page here puts it in a single line: allow at least 90 cm on each long side so chairs can be pulled out comfortably. That is mechanics rather than comfort. A dining chair travels most of its own depth backwards before anyone can stand up out of it, and a person edging past behind that chair wants what is left. Below 90 cm, somebody at the table has to get up so somebody else can reach the kitchen — every meal, for as long as you own it.

Two long sides at 90 cm each is 180 cm of floor that belongs to the chairs and not to the table. So the sum is a subtraction, done twice:

• Room length − 180 cm = the longest table the room will take.
• Room width − 180 cm = the widest table the room will take.
• Whichever answer comes back smaller is the one that decides.

A room 420 cm by 320 cm returns 240 cm and 140 cm. No dining footprint here is wider than 110 cm, so the width was never the constraint — the length is, and 240 cm is the ceiling. That is the usual shape of the answer. Even the smallest footprint, 180 × 90 cm, wants 360 cm by 270 cm of floor around it.

Ten minutes on the floor with a tape measure settles this. Nothing else does.

About 60 cm of edge per place setting

Once the room has named a maximum length, the length names a number of people. The working figure is roughly 60 cm of table edge per place setting: a plate, a glass, cutlery either side and enough air not to be handling someone else’s knife. Every seat count on this site is built from it.

70 cm is worth having where the room can afford it — for chairs with arms, which are wider than they look and will not tuck in, and for a table that doubles as a desk. The difference is not academic. On the longest top here, 320 cm a side carries 5 places at 60 cm and 4 at 70 — one whole person, same table, decided by the chairs.

It is also why several sizes carry two numbers rather than one. A label reading “Seats 4–6” is not hedging: the lower figure is the number the size is sold as, the higher the number it will take. The six-seater page answers that distinction twice over, and the eight and ten pages do the same.

The live edge rule: chairs on the long sides only

Here is where a live edge table stops following the ordinary advice. Chairs go on the two long sides, and the ends are left open on purpose: the narrow ends of a slab are where the tree’s own outline is, the part that was never cut straight. A chair pulled up there puts somebody’s knees against the most irregular part of the top, and hides behind a chair back the thing the table was bought for.

The cost is real, and worth stating plainly: a live edge table seats fewer people than a factory rectangle of the same length. The longest size in this collection, 320 × 110 cm, is labelled “Seats 10” — 5 a side. A rectangle of exactly the same length, counted on all four sides the way most listings count them, would be advertised as 12. Same floor space, two more chairs, and a worse table.

There is a compensation the arithmetic misses. The ends stay clear, and a table seating eight with two open ends is a more usable object than one seating ten with nowhere to put the roast.

One dining piece here is not governed by any of this: The Glacier. Stone rather than wood — vein instead of grain, no live edge to preserve, ends that curve rather than end. The same footprints and seat counts still apply, because a place setting does not care what the top is made of. See the marble page and the oval page for what a cornerless top changes.

Six footprints, and the room each one asks for

These are the standard dining footprints. The room columns are the subtraction above run backwards — the footprint plus 180 cm — shown as the sum rather than the answer, so you can see where the number came from.

Height, and the gap under the top

Every dining table in this catalogue stands 76 cm to the top surface — the third figure in each piece’s dimensions line. It is standard dining height, which is what chairs are built to.

The rule of thumb runs the other way round. A chair with a seat about 45 cm from the floor sits 31 cm below the top surface, and roughly 30 cm of clear space between seat and underside is what lets an adult cross their legs. Much below that and the arms on a chair will find the limit long before anyone’s knees do.

Now the part most guides skip. What decides this is not the height of the top but the height of the underside, lower by the thickness of the top, and a slab is thicker than a factory panel. The under-top clearance of these pieces has never been measured, so it is not stated anywhere on this site. That is deliberate: a figure nobody has taken a tape to is worth less than no figure at all, and it is exactly the sort of number a buyer discovers is wrong on delivery day.

Measure the door, not only the room

A solid top does not flex. There is no leaf, no fold and nothing to unbolt across the middle: it arrives in one piece and is assembled onto its frame in the room where it will stand. So the room is only half the measuring, and it is the half people remember. The other half is the route.

• The narrowest doorway on the way in, measured between the stops rather than the architraves.
• The turn. A rigid length going round a right angle needs width in both hallways at once, and that is usually what decides it — not the door.
• On a stair: the gap between banister and wall, and the headroom over a half-landing, where the turn happens in the air.
• In a lift: its internal depth, and its diagonal.

The arithmetic for that turn — how much hallway a given length wants — is worked through on the London delivery page, footprint by footprint. Do it before you settle on a size, not after. The slot is confirmed within 24 hours of an enquiry and the access is talked through then; the table is delivered and assembled by hand within 48, with the packaging taken away. If a table already stands in that room, the trade-in takes it out in the same van and credits it against the price.

If the room sits between two sizes

Go down. The clearance is what you live with three times a day; the extra place setting is what you want six evenings a year. A table 20 cm longer than the room wants is not 20 cm of mild inconvenience — it is one chair at the end of the run that cannot come out without moving the chair beside it, for the life of the table.

The exception is a room that clears the arithmetic and a household that genuinely sits the larger number most weeks. Then go up, and count the meals rather than the guest list. Everything in between is answered better by the chairs: narrower ones, or ones without arms, buy a place at the same length far more cheaply than a longer top does.

And if it is still two sizes wide, come at it from the material instead: oak, walnut, Suar and marble sit at different prices for the same footprint. Nothing here is made to order, so there is no lead time to gamble on, and once it is yours it is looked after with a damp cloth.

Dining table size questions