Resident New Release - Plane Table by Jamie McLellan

As previewed during the recent Salone del Mobile in Milan and the New Zealand Pavilion in San Francisco, Resident is proud to release the Plane Tables by Jamie McLellan.

Plane is a feature dining table available in rectangle and round. Pure and poised, it stacks hefty slabs of timber atop each other in a seemingly impossible balancing act. Clever engineering holds the legs, cross beam and table top together in an altar-like assembly that is both useable and sculptural.

Plane Tables are shipped in a super efficient broken down / flat packed state at a fraction of the assembled volume. Once at their destination the monolithic slabs of solid timber can be unpacked, stacked on edge like gigantic building blocks and tied together using cleverly hidden steel connections.
 
For Jamie McLellan, the Plane Tables are an embodiment of a child-like fascination with balanced and cantilevered assemblages.

"I’ve been thinking about building a table for our home and I came back to the idea of very simple stacked block forms, using cantilever elements that to me feel reminiscent of contemporary architecture. I've been working closely with Pam and Nat from Cheshire architects recently and the way they think about volume and form has rubbed off on my way of thinking too.   
 
As New Zealanders, we spend so much time close to nature, we have so much space around us, we're not used to living in dense metropolises, we have a lot of time to reflect on the landmass around us. When it comes to designing things we're not so slick and so shiny and so synthetic in our work and I'm sure this comes from the environment. Even the wildlife that inhabits our surroundings informs a bit of our personalities as Kiwis and this maybe even trickles through into our design.
 
It's really hard to try and attach an aesthetic to a specific place these days as we're all so interconnected, but I do think there is a theme of honesty and pragmatism that comes up in New Zealand design and architecture, time and time again. It's a kind of raw refinement, it's a little closer to the earth.

To start the design process we had maybe 10 different variations of this stacked theme and some of them were quite elaborate, but in the end we just came to the most pure and honest and brutal solution. The nice thing about this table is it's a little more expressive than the average four legged table. To keep the table from toppling over, but still maintain the look that everything is tenuously balanced on top of each other, there is a system of clever internal bracketing discreetly hidden away within the solid timber."
 
- Jamie McLellan