Benchmark’s ‘Tree’ was exhibited at London Design Festival 2011 to great acclaim. It is an astonishing table at 11.4m long and made from a single plank of oak ‘balanced’ on a mirror polished stainless steel pyramid.
Benchmark’s design, working in collaboration with Mark Lovell from MLDE, is derived from the structure of a living tree, with the roots (the pyramid) anchoring it to the ground and the branches, under compression, supporting the load of the huge canopy. The result is a table that appears impossibly balanced but, in reality, can support the weight of four adults standing on one end.
The plank comes from a huge oak tree that was planted around 1870 in the Landes, South West France. It is the longest planked oak log that any of Benchmark’s sources in the timber trade has ever known and took Benchmark over six months to locate. The plank comes from the very centre of the tree with the ‘bull’s-eye’ of the annual rings running through the centre of the plank. It is unlikely that a plank of this length, width and uniformity will be found again.e

A magnificent one-off 11.4m (37'5") table made from a single plank of oak 'balanced' on a mirror polished stainless steel pyramid.

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Designer: Mark Lovell