The hidden cost of buying the wrong dining table first

There is a calculation almost nobody does before buying a dining table, which is this: how many tables am I likely to buy before I get one I'm happy with?

The honest answer, for a great many households, is more than one. The first table is bought at a price that feels reasonable — three or four hundred pounds, maybe a little more. It looks fine in the showroom. It arrives, gets assembled, sits in the room. Within two or three years, something has gone wrong. The veneer has chipped at a corner. A leg has loosened. The finish has worn at the head. The whole thing looks tired in a way you can't quite restore. So it goes — to the charity shop, the local Facebook page, the bin — and you buy another.

This time, having learned, you spend a little more. The new table is better. But it is still made to a price, and within five or six years the same conversation repeats. Eventually, a decade and three tables in, you find yourself asking why nobody told you to buy a properly made piece in the first place.

The arithmetic, when you do it, is a small revelation. Three short-lived tables at five or six hundred pounds each comes to fifteen or eighteen hundred pounds, plus three rounds of disposal, three rounds of delivery, and three rounds of the small disappointment of furniture that doesn't last. A single, well-made bespoke table — built in solid timber, to your dimensions, by hand — comes in at a similar all-in figure, and stays in the room for thirty or forty years rather than three or four. (Our note on are bespoke dining tables worth the money goes into this calculation in more detail, and how long a properly made dining table should last covers the longevity side.)

The hidden cost of the cheap table isn't the cheap table. It's the next two cheap tables that follow it. We'd much rather build you one piece you'll have for the rest of your life than be the third name on a list.