Finding a coffee table can be a pain. Usually they're an afterthought. You've managed to fit the couch and a couple of chairs into your space and then you remember, oh, that's right, I need a coffee table — to set down drinks, your iPad, a book, the remotes, maybe even to sub as your dining room table, with everyone sitting on the floor around it. And so the search begins. Too big, too small, too low, too high, too ugly, too blah. Why not skip the search and create something that's not only perfect for your space but also uniquely yours?
Consider the coffee table: at its most basic it's a flat top, whether of glass or wood, supported by a base.
Once you realize that, your mind opens to the possibilities. Challenge your imagination to discover simple bases in objects you might otherwise overlook — two raffia ottomans from Ikea stacked one on top of the other; a chair frame missing its back and seat; a large, ornately painted and overturned flowerpot; the bottom of an old Herman Miller table; an old wooden stool with its legs cut down; your precious issues of Domino sitting shoulder to shoulder with that stack of the OMNI magazines you found at a garage sale; your child's discarded blocks or Legos built into sturdy squares or rectangles; an old garden statue, reclining on its side; a cluster of cylindrical glass vases filled with your collections of marbles or rocks or toy cars.
Top your base with a piece of glass or wood cut round, square, oval, even triangular, if that's what your space needs. If you opt for glass, a local glass cutter should be able to do this for you for under $50 (depending on whether your base demands a beveled edge or not; an ornate or antiqute base often needs a beveled edge to balance it). A lumberyard can cut your choice of wood (which you can then stain, paint, varnish, or decoupage) for a lot less. Try a mirrored top if you're looking for something particularly glamorous. A 1/4 inch thickness is large enough to be sturdy, yet thin enough to be elegant.
And you're done. Sit back, relax, put your feet up.
(Image: Rima Campbell/Ann's East Village Aerie)
Ellen's Thirties Style Small Space
Juan's Garage Turned Modern Guest House
Good Food to Share 
The Big Book of Small, Cool Spaces 
Apartment Therapy Presents 
The Eight-Step Home Cure 
Commercial Flour Sa...
10 Picnic-Ready Salads to Eat Outside
Recipe: Thai Ginger Chicken Stir-Fry
For one thing, this doesn't seem very stable. For another, it would be a nightmare to dust over time. I am all for making a DIY table, but I would think you would want to attach the legs somehow. This reminds me of the DIY boards and bricks bookcases that we made in grad school..thank God there were no earthquakes.
I'd love to hear what other people have put together. I'm thinking about doing a simple glass coffee table but have no idea about the base. Something simple, unobtrusive, but elegant. It would also be pretty big, probably 48x40. Any specific ideas? I'm fine with building some kind of base out of wood but not sure of the details
Agree w/ENSUENOS.
A co-worker has a small truck holding up a piece of glass at one end and at the other there are 2 oriental statues at each corner.
It's not only beautiful, but stable as well so I do like the idea just a better one than 'books'.
Agreed. Keeping this clean, and stability would be an issue. This particular style reminds me of one that Factory20.com was selling several months ago. It was a bunch of "antique" books piled up exactly as shown here, with "antique" barnboards used for the top. One could have assembled it themselves for about $30 from items obtained at a garage sale. Their price? over $3,000.
sometimes I find these look beautiful in a well styled photoshoot, like this. But in my home, it would just look like a bad dorm-style disaster.
I actually dont even HAVE one right now, and I havent missed it!
However, i do like unique coffee tables.
This is book abuse! I'd love pictures of some of the truly interesting ideas described.
Agreed with pictures - I'll be in the market for a coffee table soon, and I'd love some inspiration for simple, industrial DIY styles.
Sorry..small TRUNK, not truck. YIKES.
Book abuse...exactly my reaction as well!
I remember seeing a film (or it could have been a book I read? ) where a little boy gets much of his learning from a book his father or grandfather used to prop up the kitchen table leg. The boy would take it out and read it occasionally.
That just reminded me...
did something similar in my college days --it was a huge pain to keep clean and dusted. replaced it with an old trunk. much better & still have the trunk!
I'ts nice for a photoshoot. I like the concept. Just not very functional IMO. It would be a pain to move and I can't even count the amount of times a week or even a day I find I need to scooch the table around.
I currently have both a coffee table book coffee table and a set-of-encyclopedias end table. Both are perftectly stable. The local glass place cut the glass for the tops for a total of $50. (I do live in a rural area, so it would probably be more in, say, Manhattan.)
They are conversation starters. I planned to get rid of many of the coffee table books when I moved into the house, but I had always wanted to try this and it worked out well. When my DMIL saw my coffee table, she offered me the set of encyclopedias she'd planned to get rid of.
For each table I made TWO stacks of books and the results are suprisingly functional.
Hmm, this could work though as a permanent installatin. Perhaps you could core out the center of some god-awful/ damaged books, and slip them up the legs of a table, then cap them on the bottom so they don't slide down when you pick up or move the table.
yeah I like the concept and look of it but the stability thing not so much, esp with kids in the mix. As a librarian it's a pretty crap thing to do to your books in terms of quality storage (not good for spines and the dust!).
I see dirty spaces. Oooh, the places dirt can go and build up on those books. Not to mention, how does one move it?
I can't stand it when folks use books as props. I don't have a single book in my house that I do'nt read. Referance, fiction or otherwise. It's just so ... gauche.
Vintage suitcases would make awesome table bases, or palettes with glass on top, or you could take from the plumbing pipe shelf trend and make a plumbing pipe coffee table. :) Also, I like the books as a base idea, I am sure whoever make that attached the books together by some means to keep them attached, everyone seems to go straight for the negative here.
I have a small stack of books under a tension pole lamp in my apartment that you would all love to tear me apart for.
Conejitoasesino - why can't you read the books you've propped? I also have a lot of books - and I've read ALL of them, and yes, the horror, SOME of them are propped!
Agreed.. I was just thinking that my two wild cats would knock this over in a second. I love the DIY option and was thinking of combining an old mirror and books somehow, but I would definitely need to attach everything somehow.
In college my roommate and I took a whole stack of telephone books and made a coffee table and end table out of them. That was in college.
Oh and milk crates or lobster crates
I could see this lasting, oh, about 5 minutes with my 82 pound Greyhound and his crazy hyperactive episodes.
Unavoidable dust and smudges make horizontal glass a pain in the. . .Windex® No thanks. This would work far better with a set of hardbound encyclopedias or even maybe tied together old National Geographics.
Ok to try to be creative, but there still needs to be some way to know any top is going to be pretty securely attatched to the base.
@LYONSTILL - lol! I sort of liked the truck idea! I for one love the idea of a piece of machinery (chrome engine, block & tackle, etc.) as a table base!
Regarding books as legs: I've seen more elegant versions of this where the books are bolted together and then painted in order to keep the pages from being invaded by silverfish.
I think the coffee table needs to be considered with the sofa or chairs. For instance - we need one in front of two queen anne wing back chairs. Someone gave us a table with similar legs. Yet... It's too many legs altogether. I'm thinking I need a solid block of a table to balance against the legs of the chair. Am I on the right track? Or are there other theories?
I like it. Things stay pretty calm in my house, so not too worried about tipping it over or getting it dirty. And it seems like it would be easy enough to vacuum and to swap out books when I want to look at them again.
My favorite DIY coffee table involved a square laminated table top from IKEA and 4 oversized casters.
I am not fond of furniture that can't easily be moved to clean around or relocated as needed.
I am also opposed to using books as table legs. If you own books, they should be (in my opinion as a librarian) for reading or referral: useful, in other words. When used as table legs they are obviously not accessible, so they might as well be something NOT books. (Or, if you like the biblio-furniture look, which I don't, get junk books from a thrift store and cut off the spines and glue them to the real legs of furniture (found or created) to give the illusion without the ungainliness of loose stacks of books.)
A base for a glass top coffee table could be made with two pieces of plywood notched in the center to cross and interlock. (Use that iron-on veneer edging to hide the plys and stain.)
Thrift stores usually have lots of options that could be modified with paint, extended tops, wallpaper, glued-on fabric, etc.
I have seen pillars meant to hold big fat candles which could be used as coffee table legs with a glass or other top. Some fancy ethnic ones might be gorgeous that way. (I'd try to stabilize them somehow -- maybe drill holes and add dowels as cross bars or something.)
Just not books! ;^)
For years I used an old wooden ironing board as a coffee table...the type I used had an adjustable height bottom...it worked/looked great!
Why is everyone getting so hung up on the books setup in the photo? The point of the article is to get you to approach the idea of the coffee table differently by considering that the support and top can be totally different, unique items.
I also don't understand how this is book abuse. Rather than sitting on a bookcase collecting dust, they are serving a function and providing visual interest. Not everyone is holier-than-thou when it comes to books. Let people do what they want with theirs!
Ha! Well at least with telephone books there's no chance you'll need them!
It's a desecration of real books to use them for something like this.
We ditched the coffee table four years ago and have never missed it. A pair of stools or small tables (I've used both) works so much better for our furniture and floorplan. Plus we can just push them to the side when we want space to play with the dogs or baby on the living room rug.
This is a neat idea...However...What if I wanted to read one of those books? Wouldn't I then be stuck with a wobbly uneven table? :P
My houseplants sit on "tables" made of a single large floor tile (left from a bathroom remodel) sitting on a wire wastepaper basket. It looks pretty good, its stable, and spilled water doesn't hurt a thing.
@SWINGNCOCOA - Thank you, my thoughts exactly. The photo just serves as one example people. How about talking about interesting ideas for coffee tables instead of whining about an arbitrary photo? I second the comments about using an old trunk. Put some casters on it and you're in business.
I have not had a coffee table for 30 years; I think they just waste space. I have an ottoman though, it is useful and you can stick stuff inside.
I don't like using books as furniture legs, or anything other than being a book.
@SwingNCocoa and @TapedDeckDreams, it's a CONVERSATION. Nobody here has any authority to prevent anybody else from doing any darned thing they want -- but it's perfectly appropriate to comment on the appropriateness or even just our personal opinions about this or any idea.
That said, as a librarian, let me point out that books are not as stable as you may think, especially older books with softer paper for the pages. They can shift, slip, deform, warp, dumping your tabletop onto your toes without warning. Pressure of any real weight on the spines can cause them to crack.
If the only reason you have these particular books is to hold up your tabletop, I guess you won't care and it doesn't matter. MY argument is that if you are doing it also to store books you actually have some reason to keep, you can be ruining the books as well as making them essentially inaccessible, AND making a "piece" of furniture which is difficult to move around or clean beneath. These arguments would apply almost equally to any regular household item used to prop up a table top in this way -- stack of plates, suitcases, vases, whatever... if you have them because you love them (which is how many small-space dwellers prefer to live), using them as table bases limits their usability. But nobody says you can't do it anyhow.
while my books aren't really pretty enough to do this with (university-grade paperbacks) i think it's a fun idea. it pushes the resident to not only get creative, but continue to be creative. where i am in my life, i could buy a couch, but it would take me months to purchase a coffee table. stacking up a flat surface on books takes care of book storage issues (in a small apartment, it's almost impossible to have a ton of books all with shelf space. if there's room, it ends up looking like the most boring corner of your livingroom) and it gives you a spot for the remote for 6 months.
my coffee table is an antique trunk i got at the elegant garage sale here in toronto (of sarah richardson fame) and i love it's look and storage abilities. i'm also glad i paid for the whole thing - if something happened to my relationship, it would break my heart for him to claim it when settling up items.
Wow. Never would have thought of that.
I recently made a coffee table from the top of an old wooden crate, with legs made from pipes and pipe fittings I bought at a hardware store. The whole thing cost thirty dollars.
mmm.... this looks great until you want to read one of them!
Personally, I hate glass topped furniture. Shows too much dust, too many smudges, & hate the glare that comes off them. Yuck. And THIS is a glass house of horrors in my book (yes, pun intended). I use a couple of old wooden milk & beer crates as coffee tables. I put some roller wheels on the bottoms, fill them with collections of favorite things (beach/nature things, old toys & books, change the things out for different seasons, etc.) and fitted non-glare plexiglass to the top. Coffee tables that easily move, are ample enough to hold a few drinks & a magazine/book, but not so big as to become a catch all for junk (like mail, piles of magazines, etc.). And they are stable! This set up looks not only unstable, but annoying to keep clean.
Books on the bookshelves.
Level glass-topped tables are very stable. Our glass coffee table is 48" x 72" x 1" atop a bronze base that resembles a vine. It's not going anywhere. It's VERY heavy and it has survived in a house with many young children and teenagers. One granddaughter did bang into it and got a serious bruise. I find when the glass is dusted before I spray clean it there are very few streaks: no dust = no streaks.
Oh my gosh! I hate that people get so ridiculous about books. Do you really hold sacred an algebra book from the 1930's? Or and electrician's textbook from the 50's? The world is full of old books! They don't have to be revered- they can be used by the people that bought them for what they want. Sorry- I just get so upset about the "holier-than-thou" attitude that I see in these comments. I like the coffee table- I think it looks interesting and it makes me want to look at it more which is something that no conventional coffee table makes me want to do.
Getting the four pillars to measure the EXACT same height when composed of an assortment of books must have taken dedication. A set of encyclopedias would be easier but dull visually. I guess the wooden edging stops the glass moving. Hmm. Very good to look at in this particular room. My cats would use it for a back scratch and a face rub and knock books out of alignment, and I'd be sure to bump into it. But I admire it. Many times better looking than bricks and wood or crates with anything. I saw a trunk coffee table once, years back, that was quite unpleasant, but with a more appealing trunk I'd love it. No creative ideas from me either. I like seeing what other people do. But watch out for spines cracking!!
Thanks for showing me to think more creatively!
I have horrible experiences with glass top tables, so I'm gonna have to pass... but I like the idea of making your own coffee table. It would just have to be well thought about, seeing that I wouldn't want my coffee table to fall over all the time.
Creative and functional.
LOVE the pillow to the left!!!!!
Books can get kind of pricey if you do it that way but this article opens up a host of possibilities. I'm kind of sitting here face palming myself wondering why I hadn't thought of this myself. I was thinking four plastic or glass vases of same size but different design, adding rocks or marbles to the bottom and arranging some fake flowers that complement the rooms colors and instead of glass top using wood and painting it. Also if you use two slim bookcases (the two shelf variety) on each end you can put books in them with decorations and create a way to show off your books that allows for easy access. If you use the wood bookshelves with the wood top you can drill them together. So many ways to hide nails so that's not even a problem. This article just opened a creative landslide in my head and now I'm quite relieved I don't have to spend a fortune on a cofffee table