Langham Side Table — In Amber

Bobbin turning is one of those honest, unshowy details that has quietly held furniture together, and made it prettier, for a few hundred years. Those knobbly rows of stacked beads are a woodturner's way of showing off without raising his voice, a trick the seventeenth century loved and the Victorians revived in their spool furniture. Here they give the table its whole character.

Built from solid wood in a warm, open-grained amber, it has a single drawer on a sleek brass pull and two open shelves below for books, a short stack of magazines, or a few objects you simply like looking at. At just over two feet tall it sits at a comfortable height beside a chair or a bed: high enough for a lamp and a glass, generous enough to actually store something.

Put it next to a reading chair where the drawer can swallow the remote and the reading glasses, use it as a bedside table with real storage, or stand it in an entrance to catch keys up top and shoes below. It proves that small doesn't have to mean slight.