Duffy London brings depth with its Abyss table

Deep Blue Sea

With his 1.8m-long, 0.9m-wide glass-topped dining table, furniture designer Christopher Duffy depicts varying levels of the seafloor. The Abyss table (US$41,000, RM164,000), Duffy says, pays tribute to a corner of the Caribbean, though he refrains from divulging the exact place. “I appreciate the impact of where two realities meet,” he offers, “land and sky, sea and land.”

Limited to 25 examples, the Abyss table requires three to four months to produce and is executed by five artisans in East London, where the designer founded his business in 2002. They use precision machinery to shape each slice of birch plywood, then position the pieces of wood by hand before placing small LED lights within the strata, adding layers of tinted blue glass, and setting the full assembly atop its rectangular support.

“I love how the wooden top interacts with the metal base,” says Duffy. “It’s as if (the tabletop) is organically growing out of it and eating it away – like nature is taking back a city in a post-apocalyptic world.”

Duffy London