Here it is. Yes, this is REALLY what you see when you drive up to Furnitureland South. The place is huge. If you’ve been to the Atlanta Mart, or over to Maison et Objet, or maybe the New York Gift Show, then you will know what I mean! So actually, this enormous “piece of furniture” really does serve as a perfect beginning to your day here.

We were in search of a dining room table. Hmmm… we don’t have a “real” dining room any more, so maybe this should be classified as a dining area table.
This is the area. And this is the table we wanted to replace. 
The chairs here are from Pottery Barn, before they were covered. You can read the story about fabric and contrast piping.  
To give you all a little background about why this area is “new” to us, take a look at this video I had done in my dining room in our old house up North. Yes indeed, it was a R E A L dining room. The house was built in 1924 and the dining room was one of the reasons we bought it! The bay window was lovely, especially after we painted it white.
Here you go:

Now, back to my search for a new dining table. The rectangle shape had been perfect in above dining room. But now, in our smaller, and square shape area, it just did not work.I guess we knew that from the minute we bought the house. I searched the usual sources… the catalogues and outlets on line. I considered a table that had been in my father’s family, but it needed A LOT of work and was/is sitting in Boston. Just didn’t seem worth it.

I have always loved round dining tables. Always. And I had never had one. So this was my chance! I wanted one with four legs, not a pedestal base. Well, that was not to be. We soon realized that having legs would be very limiting in our seating arrangement. This is not a huge room. And, we certainly would need an extension leaf for any new table.

Thanks to my new friend, Mary James, I was introduced to Furnitureland South and Greg Hughes. Mary James and Greg are old, old friends in Greensboro.

Greg was fabulous! His title, “Sales & Design Consultant”, hardly does him justice. Aside from being a really nice person, Greg is professional, knowledgeable and oh so easy to work with.

We looked and we looked through the huge showroom. Actually, he narrowed it all down fairly quickly as we knew what we did NOT want, and had a pretty good idea of what we DID want.
Here were some of the options:

A lot of attention to the pedestal base…

Aprons were also important to us. Some of the aprons were so deep that we realized you would not be able to cross your legs underneath the table. Not good…
We ended up ordering our table from Canadel, a Canadian company. Again, we had to choose more details as in what kind of wood and how much distressing.
Lots of bases from which to choose:

And now, for the finished product! Delivered on time, assembled and in immaculate condition.

Here’s the base detail. It’s not too heavy (which is what I do NOT like about so many pedestals), and yet large enough to accomodate the leaf. The table is 48″ round and with the leaf it becomes 68″. It seats four very comfortably with these large Parsons chairs. We had seven here last week and it was fine, especially as our fill-in chairs are slimmer.

The walls are still a work in progress..Remember my post about our trip to Mebane? And those architectural ornaments I found? I’ll show you more on that in my next post!