It’s a marker of having made it when your flat gets a rattan coffee table. Sun streaming through the blinds, forgotten catalogue you leaf through but won’t bring yourself to throw away: all these are admirable, but they aren’t enough to qualify your living room as being stylishly lived-in. Coasters nursing rings that aren’t yours take care of that job alone.
Of course, the reality is more likely to be three coasters disappearing within a fortnight, a mug circle that someone insisted was “just really cold” and panicked about afterwards, and low-level paranoia whenever anyone sets anything down without first asking if it’s okay. But we keep buying them. Something about the weave signals lived-in rather than carefully curated, even when the space in question resembles the hoover-ing version of your study: child shoe perpetually wedged underneath, dog hair situation that would have health and safety choking on a squeaky toy.
They’re light enough to drag across the room by yourself and hoover-ed under with minimal logistical difficulties, and they don’t intimidate people like a large glass or marble top will. They sit there liking having food stained on them, mostly.
Where everyone cannot agree, however, is on the addition of a tray.
There’s tray camp, who will assure you firmly that a tray solves everything.
Mess is contained, the remote has a home that isn’t halfway down the sofa.
No tray camp: rattan table plus tray just gives you another thing to spill stuff all over! Now you have to wipe down two objects instead of one. Spend five minutes cleaning and you’ve still got the problem.
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Where it all comes crashing down every. Single. Time. another one of us buys a rattan coffee table though is the cat. Repeat this cycle every few months and someone will arrive with fresh claw marks across a corner, igniting the ancient rallying cries about whether pets and rattan are compatible, period.
Full stop.
Done.
Friend half the office will actively encourage you to trim cat’s claws and cover up the worst of it with a throw. Friend half the office is still swearing off rattan tables four years later and moved onto wood coffee tables for a reason. They will tell you this, unasked.
The part you never see in listings: it likes dust. RUN IT OVER WITH A HOOVER ATTACHMENT at some point or it’ll gather more dust than the skirting boards do, more dust than the tops of bookshelves. Leave it a month and we guarantee you’ll learn this lesson via someone’s fingertip, almost certainly a guests’.
Our conclusion? We’ve decided it’s a coffee table for when a room gets lived in, not when it gets instagrammed. Get it for the version of your living room that has a drink on it and a child/dog on the floor, not the aspirational one shot from above. On the cat: we’ve never reached consensus on that, and we never will.
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