Shai Abbassi

I've been searching for a coffee table for our sitting room for as long as we've owned our flat. The tricky thing is that I like old things, but people didn't do coffee tables in the olden days. You can get farmhouse tables that have had their legs lopped off, but I think they always look a bit odd and stunted. Or you buy something angular and Danish, or heavy and Balinese, or an American-Psycho-style, glass-and-steel number. But last night I came across Shai Abbassi and my coffee-table search is over. Shai's ottomans and footstools are made in England using antique legs (I love the Edwardian turned mahogany ones) and covered in the most extraordinarily beautiful antique Turkish kelims. So they are old, but new, and you can have them made to your exact specifications. They're completely flat, so you can rest a tray with coffee and cups on them, sturdy and coarse so they'll last forever; but soft, too, so ideal for foot resting.