Designer coffee tables and side tables, from glass to marble

Three pieces and nothing else: a ¾ inch plate-glass top resting on two curved wooden legs that interlock into a tripod.

The table began as a private commission. In 1939 A. Conger Goodyear, the first president of the Museum of Modern Art, asked Noguchi for a coffee table, and the sculptor made him one. The version sold today came out of a quarrel. The Victoria and Albert Museum records that the designer T. H. Robsjohn-Gibbings used a scale model of a Noguchi table in an advertisement without his permission, then told him that "anybody could make a three-legged table". Noguchi redrew the design and took it to Herman Miller, which introduced it in 1948.

Herman Miller has not made it without a break since. The V&A notes that production stopped for at least the decade from 1973 to 1983. Its own example, made between about 1947 and 1955, has a birch base. Herman Miller now makes the base in solid walnut, one of the original woods, as well as white oak, white ash and a black finish.

The top is 50 inches wide and 36 deep, about 127 by 91 cm, on a rounded, freeform outline with no straight edge anywhere. The table stands 15¾ inches high, and the whole thing weighs 155 lb, so it stays exactly where it is put.

Because the top is clear, the base is what you see from every angle, including from above, along with whatever rug lies under it. Herman Miller marks the real ones in two places. Noguchi's signature appears on the longest edge of the glass and on a medallion under the base, and his initials sit stamped into the wood beneath the medallion.

A ceramic top made to look like dark marble, which means a wet glass or a splash of wine leaves nothing behind.

Morten Georgsen designed it for BoConcept as a single round disc, 99 cm across and 41 cm high, or 39 by 16¼ inches. The base is a matt black lacquered structure set well back from the edge, so from a sofa the top appears to sit on nothing. Of the three coffee tables here, it is the only round one, which matters more in a room than it sounds: there are no corners to walk into, and nobody on the sofa gets the short end.

The top is what sets it apart. Marble is mostly calcium carbonate, and acids dissolve calcium carbonate, so lemon juice, wine and some cleaning sprays leave dull marks called etching, even on sealed stone. A ceramic top goes through a kiln at high temperature and comes out with a hard, closed surface that those things cannot get into. It is the marble look with none of the upkeep, and it takes a hot pot better than natural stone does.

BoConcept makes it to order, and the Madrid range includes other tables in the same language, so two can sit layered at different heights.

It is the most practical of the six to live with every day, and the one least likely to need a coaster. The veining is a printed pattern, so every Madrid looks the same. That will suit anyone who wants to know exactly what will arrive.

The lowest table here by 11 cm: a long box of marble slabs, 100 cm by 60, standing 27 cm off the floor.

Norm Architects drew it for Audo. Jonas Bjerre-Poulsen and Kasper Rønn founded the studio in Copenhagen in 2008, and some shops still sell the table under Menu, the company's earlier name. The Plinth Collection is a set of plain marble volumes, meant to work as tables, podiums or sculpture.

The weight tells you how it is made. The Plinth Low weighs 82 kg. A solid block of marble that size would weigh more than 400 kg, so what you see is a box assembled from solid slabs, with the joints doing the work of making it read as one piece of stone. Audo hones the surfaces, grinding them to a soft matte instead of a polish, and then seals them.

Audo cuts it in several stones: brown Emperador, white Carrara, rose Calacatta Viola, grey Kendzo, black Nero Marquina and Kunis Breccia, a pale stone with darker fragments. Marble is natural, so the veining on the one delivered will differ from the photograph.

At 27 cm it sits closer to the floor than to a sofa seat. It suits books, a bowl or a sculpture better than a cup reached for every few minutes, which is why Audo describes it as a table and a pedestal at once. Sealing slows staining but does not stop the etching described above, so drinks want coasters. Delivery wants two people.

Base and top are sold separately: a metal base 63 cm across, and a 65 cm top that overhangs it by a centimetre all round.

Danielle Siggerud, a Norwegian architect who trained at the Royal Danish Academy and founded her Copenhagen studio in 2016, designed it for Audo. The name refers to the mix of hard and soft at its centre. The base is two curved metal plates that meet in the middle, each cut through with a tall, round-ended opening, so the light passes through a table that looks solid from across the room.

That 1 cm overhang is the whole design. It is enough to throw a thin shadow line under the top, so the top seems to hover over the base instead of capping it. It is also why the two are sold apart. Audo makes the base in black, ivory and steel, and matches each finish to its own tops, including marble in Emperador, Calacatta Viola, Nero Marquina and Crystal Rose. The painted bases are powder-coated at a low sheen, a baked-on finish that resists scratches and fading better than liquid paint.

The price above buys the base. The top is a separate purchase from Audo, so the finished table costs more than that figure.

At 38 cm high and 65 cm wide, it sits between a coffee table and a side table, and Audo calls it a lounge table. It is broad enough for a tray and two cups beside an armchair, and low enough to pair with a sofa in a small room where a full coffee table would crowd the floor. The collection also includes a larger size and a dining table, so two Androgynes can stand together at different widths.

A 40 cm cube of marble with no front and no back, so you can turn it to show its best face.

It comes from the same Plinth Collection as the Plinth Low, by the same studio, built the same way from solid marble slabs joined into a closed box. At 40 cm on every side it is the same height as the Noguchi, which makes it a side table for a sofa or an armchair, a bedside table, or a stand for a single object. The one pictured is Kunis Breccia, a stone made of broken fragments bound back together, which reads almost like terrazzo. The other stones match the Plinth Low's, so the two can be bought as a set.

The cube is the shape that shows marble best. Every face is a slab large enough to carry a full run of veining, and because the four sides meet at sharp corners, the pattern on one face stops cleanly where the next begins. A round table shows its stone mostly on top. This one shows it on five sides at once.

The family has a third member, the Plinth Tall, a 30 cm square column 51 cm high, for a lamp or a plant that wants to stand above the furniture around it.

Of the side tables, it is the one that reads as an object first and a table second. With a lamp on it, it looks like furniture. Bare, it looks like something waiting for a sculpture. A full glass on marble needs the same care as on the Plinth Low, and its weight means it goes in one place and stays.

Sold as a coffee table and built like a side table: 40 cm across and 51 cm tall, the tallest here by 10 cm.

Ramūnas Minkevičius designed it in 2024 for Kismas, which makes it in Lithuania. It is a round aluminium top on a set of vertical panels that slot into each other at right angles, with black rubber O-rings holding them together, the same kind of ring used to seal a pipe. Assembly takes a few minutes and needs nothing but hands.

The panels are cut from raw aluminium sheet by milling, a rotating cutter that shaves the metal away, instead of by laser. Kismas says milling is slower and more expensive, and it leaves a smoother, more precise edge, which matters on a table that is all edges. Where the panels cross they form four open bays under the top, sized for magazines, a few books or a plant.

It weighs 7.2 kg, or 15.9 lb, about a tenth of the Noguchi. That makes it the only table on the list one person can lift with one hand and carry to the other side of the room. Raw aluminium is left unpainted, and Kismas asks for mild soap and a soft cloth, never an abrasive sponge.

At 51 cm the top meets your hand at the height of an armchair's arm or a bed's mattress, so it works best at the side of a seat or as a nightstand. In front of a low sofa it would stand too tall to be a coffee table in the usual sense. The name says coffee table. The dimensions say side table, and the dimensions are the ones to trust.