By the middle of the 1980s the pedestal table had been reduced to three parts, a circle, a cylinder and a disc on the floor, and the thinking behind it was postmodern rather than modernist, because the point was never honesty about materials but the look of hard geometry standing in a room. For about fifteen years they turned up in foyers and apartments right across Europe.

These two were made as a pair and are worth having as one. A single table of this kind is useful; two of them are a system, sitting either end of a sofa, pushing together into one low round surface, or going to separate rooms and still reading as a set. They come apart for moving, which is the sort of thing that decides whether an object survives a house or not.