Art Deco was named forty years after it ended. The style takes its name from a Paris exhibition of 1925, but nobody at that exhibition called it Art Deco. The phrase did not reach print until 1966, in the title of another Paris show, and it was Bevis Hillier's book two years later that put it into general use. The thing was christened retrospectively, by people looking back at it, and more or less everything made in the style since has been made in that same backward-looking spirit.

This table is honest about being one of those. It is not from the thirties and it does not pretend to be. But whoever made it understood what they were looking at. The corners are canted rather than square, which is the move that stops the whole thing reading as a box. Four legs swell out of the underframe and curve back in to a plinth, so the base is a shape rather than four sticks. A black lacquered line runs round the top edge and again round the plinth, doing exactly the job a black line does on a 1930s cabinet: holding the silhouette so the timber can carry everything else.

The timber is the argument. Bird's-eye maple, the figure that looks like the surface has been rained on, laid in matched quarters across the top with a bevelled glass panel dropped into the middle of it so you look straight through to the frame below. Real veneer, well laid, running the way it should.

There is no label, no stamp and nothing underneath. Whoever built it did not sign it, which is usual in a trade that was selling the look rather than the name.