Why you can't sit comfortably at your own dining table

It's a small thing to admit, but it's a real one. There is a particular kind of dining table that you cannot quite settle at — and the strange part is that nobody mentions it, because it feels almost rude to say. The food is on the table, the company is good, the wine is open. And yet you cannot find a comfortable position. Your knees are clipping something. Your chair is at the wrong height. The seat opposite is at a slightly different distance from the table than yours. By the time the pudding arrives, you've subtly shifted three times.

There are a handful of culprits, and once you start noticing them, you'll spot them in nearly every dining room you visit.

The first is table height. The standard, in well-made furniture, sits at 76cm — measured from the floor to the top surface. A few centimetres taller and the table feels a little hospital-canteen. A few shorter and you stoop. We make every Lumbr table to 76cm precisely, because that is the height a proper chair was designed to meet.

The second is the underside. A pedestal that is too generous in girth eats the legroom of the people sitting at the ends. A long stretcher running between the legs catches every shin in the room. A wide apron — the timber that runs around the underside of the top — leaves no room for thighs to slide under. (Worth reading our note on why pedestals, stretchers and aprons get in everyone's way.)

The third is the chair. Even a beautifully made table can be undone by chairs that are the wrong height for it, or whose seats are too deep, or whose arms catch the apron. The seat surface should sit roughly 30cm below the underside of the table top — no less.

The fourth, and the one we see most often, is proximity. The legs of the table are placed too close to the corners, so the end seats have nowhere for the diner's knees to go without catching wood. Bespoke makers — ourselves included — set the leg position to leave a generous overhang at each end. It is the small, invisible thing that means the end seats actually work.

If your table is fighting you, it is worth knowing it doesn't have to. (The comfort problem nobody mentions goes into this in a little more depth.)