A coffee table sits at the centre of a room in a way almost no other piece of furniture does. It's where drinks land, feet rest, and eyes go first when you walk in — which is exactly why the material it's made from matters more than people usually think about at the point of buying one.
Wood, natural stone, and glass are the obvious choices. Porcelain rarely makes the shortlist, mostly because people don't know it's an option. It should be.
Wood looks warm, until it doesn't
Timber ages well in theory and unevenly in practice. Rings from hot mugs, scratches from keys and coasters that got skipped, a slow fade wherever direct sunlight hits it for a few years — wood shows its use. It needs oiling, resealing, and a level of care that a lot of us simply don't keep up with once the table's a few years old.
Natural stone is beautiful and genuinely high-maintenance
Marble and other natural stone tops look incredible in a showroom and then spend the rest of their life being babied. Stone is porous — a glass of red wine left too long, a ring from a citrus glass, even acidic cleaning products can etch or stain it permanently. It's also heavy, expensive, and every slab is at the mercy of the quarry it came from.
Glass is practical, until it isn't
Glass wipes clean and shows every fingerprint doing it. It scratches more easily than people expect, chips at the edges, and however you dress it up, it reads as cold rather than considered. It's also the one material here that can genuinely fail — a crack in glass isn't a character mark, it's the table needing to be replaced.
Porcelain does what the others can't at once
Porcelain is the same material we hold to specification into every basin we make — sourced from the same Spanish and Italian suppliers, held to the same standard. It doesn't stain, scratch anywhere near as easily as stone, doesn't need re-oiling or resealing, and it's entirely unaffected by heat, spills, or the odd hot mug landing straight from the kettle. It's fired to be harder-wearing than almost anything else you'd put in a living room, and it holds its colour and finish indefinitely rather than ageing the way timber does.
It's also simply less common. A tiled coffee table isn't something most people have seen before, which means it does more work as a genuine talking point in a room than another version of the same wood or marble table everyone already owns.
How it comes together
The Slab and The Disc are both fabricated from a single sheet of porcelain, typically between 6mm and 12mm depending on the size, style and design — the same material and specification used across every basin we make. Each one is water jet cut for a perfectly clean rounded edge or a true circle that isn't achievable working by hand. That slab then sits directly on its legs as one continuous surface, rather than being pieced together from smaller tiles.
If you're picturing something different — a box-shaped or rectangular table built up from smaller tiles with mitred corners, fabricated the same way as a basin — that's entirely possible too, commissioned to your own specification rather than a standard shape. We can fabricate from pretty much any tile in the world, so if you've got something specific in mind, bring it to us.
The Slab and The Disc are both live now, in the same porcelain and the same standard of finish that goes into every basin we make.
If you've been picturing a coffee table that doesn't look like everyone else's, we'd like to hear about it.