The Complete Handbook of Conference Room Tables

Chapter 1: Understanding Conference Room Tables

A conference room table is not a desk, a dining table, or a piece of art. It is a load-bearing platform that must perform several simultaneous jobs. It must hold the weight of laptops, tablets, and notebooks. It must accommodate the sprawl of a paper agenda or a set of architectural drawings. It must provide a physical pathway for power and data cables, and it must keep those cables from tangling around ankles or sliding off the surface mid-meeting. In many modern installations, it must also carry the weight of a display screen, a video bar, or a ceiling-mounted drop that descends through a hole cut in the tabletop. This is not a trivial set of requirements, and yet most buyers approach the purchase with only two questions: what size fits the room, and what does it look like.

Those two questions matter, but they are only the starting point. A conference room table is the single most heavily used item of furniture in most office buildings. A standard meeting room might see eight to twelve meetings per day, each with an average duration of forty-five minutes. That means the table's surface is in near-constant contact with hands, wrists, coffee mugs, keyboards, and writing instruments. The edge takes impact from chairs being pushed in and out. The legs are kicked, the base is scuffed by floor cleaning machines, and the finish is exposed to chemical cleaners that may or may not be appropriate for