Half of us believe a walnut bedside table is worth spending actual money on. The other half believe that is precisely the kind of statement people must make right before splashing out £300 on somewhere to put their glass of water. Both camps have been vehemently represented by people in the same meeting who then went home and bought one anyway.
Here’s something nobody tells you about walnut specifically: walnut does not hide your sins. Pine will absorb a coffee ring like you’re giving it a favour. Walnut will get darker, richer with every year you own it. Which is lovely until you realise that also means every water ring, every candle wax drip, every phone charger you accidentally drag across it at 6am will be etched into the wood forevermore in anti-social sticking up for itself brown.
One of us has a ring on theirs from a mug of tea in 2019 and lovingly refers to it as a feature.
Another of us is still saltier about it four years later.
What we can all agree on, and this took many furious emails to get, is that it’s used more thoroughly than most furniture in the bedroom let’s.
A drawer you open twice a week. A wardrobe you walk past every day and don’t think about once it closes behind you. The bedside table is touched approximately forty times a day if you include phone alarms, water bottles, the book you’ll read all night but won’t finish, hand cream, the stray earring you took off but will lose within ten minutes. It is, mundanely, the most used surface in your home that nobody lets anywhere near the Instagram.
To drawer or not to drawer is where opinions get strong again. Those wanting a drawer want a place to hide the clutter from the rest of the bedroom, those pesky plasters and old train tickets and charger that nobody owns. Those who choose the open shelf argue that a drawer just becomes a home for dust, another drawer you’re afraid to open for fear of what you’ll find, shame packed away in cardboard. They would rather it all be on display and therefore, in theory, tidy. Theory! One of us keeps their open shelf stocked with two books, a hairdryer, an inhaler and, for absolutely no reason, a potato.
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The height is important in a way you don’t consider until it’s too late. Too low and every time you reach for your phone you’ll bang your head.
Higher than your knees and it looms, actual looming subconscious judgement over you as you try to sleep.
Go measure your mattress, not the ground.
Seriously.
The wood needs so little from you. Rub it down with some wax every few years if you’re feeling bourgeois? Sure. But other than that walnut doesn’t warp in the drying heating, it doesn’t require you to use coasters 100% of the time. You just buy it and it gets better looking every year than the day you bought it, quietly mocking your lack of care if wood could be mean about stuff.
The final piece of advice is buy it heavy. Heavier than you think you need. One of us woke up in the night once because their partner sneaked into their room and leaned on their bedside table. You should be able to hit it with your elbow when you’re half asleep reaching for the phone and feel totally reassured.
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