Opinion: Let's Bring Back the Telephone Table
Over the course of history, technological updates have resulted in the extinction of certain home design staples: The gramophone, the TV cabinet, and the icebox have all fallen by the wayside over the past century. So too has one of the most useful—and stylish—furniture pieces of all time: the telephone table. It's time we brought it back.
Typically placed either beside an armchair in a living room or just next to the bed in front of a nightstand (my preferred location), the telephone table is a delightfully specific, wonderfully nostalgic piece. To me, it conjures images of a chic, productive woman, dressed in her nightgown with breakfast perched on a tray and an array of newspapers fanned out around her. The telephone, set on the telephone table, is just within arms reach for her to conduct the day's business from her control center.
For many decades, this was indeed the purpose of a telephone table: Women worked inside the home and used it to connect with the outside world from the comfort of a favorite seat. The piece was a necessity in many of the best hotel rooms, too, an arrangement that led to it frequently appearing in press photographs of celebrities in the middle of the 20th century.
With its diminutive size and specific purpose, the telephone table was a more elegant piece than the all-purpose nightstand. Many were set on casters, for ease of tucking it under the nightstand or moving it should a call need to be taken in another room. But as the design of the home telephone evolved—from large upright pieces to compact rotary versions, then wall-mounted and, finally, cordless models—the need for a table dedicated to the apparatus waned. In the age of the smartphone, which is small enough to fit on the most petite nightstand and unlikely to be left very far out of arm's reach, the telephone table is largely a thing of the past.
But some designers are making the case its return.
A few years ago, Miles Redd brought the telephone table back into modern design jargon when he introduced a model in kicky colors as part of a collaboration with The Lacquer Company. In a bedroom at this year's Kips Bay Showhouse in Dallas (shown at top), design firm Avrea & Company presented a modernized take on the concept: a traditional-style telephone table outfitted with a wireless charger for today's version of the rotary.
Avrea's version was in patinated copper, which the firm had custom fabricated by a local manufacturer. The resulting teal gives a jolt to the pattern-filled room. "We wanted to use that material and we thought, 'Why not create today's version of the telephone table?'" explains principal Ashley Avrea Cathey.
She's onto something: With today's communication essentials including phones, tablets, smart watches, and ear buds that all need charging, we've essentially come full-circle in terms of real estate on the nightstand; wouldn't it make more sense to delegate all that tech to its own surface?
Perhaps, too, by giving our phones—now also de facto computers, televisions, newspapers, and record players all in one—a designated place in the room, we might be able to maintain a bit more distance from them in the latest and earliest hours of the day to get a better night's rest and establish clearer boundaries between work and personal time. Or, we could always bring back the rotary phone.
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