Folding furniture came out of the campaign trade, where everything you owned had to go on a cart, and then moved into ordinary houses for a quieter reason, which is that rooms had to do more than one job. This is the good version of it. The frame is reeded on every visible edge, three fine lines running the length of each member, and they kept going on the legs and the stretchers, which on a table built to be folded away is care spent on the half of it nobody sees.

What dates it is the hardware, and the hardware is also the mechanism. It turns on brass butt hinges let into the leg, every screw slotted, and that is the whole of what holds a folding table together and most of what tells you when it was made. The glass is the glass it came with. It has been folding and unfolding for well over a century and it still does it smoothly.