Tables & Seating
Live edge and straight edge dining tables, rounds, benches, and seating in claro walnut, white oak, bay laurel, and salvaged old growth redwood. Designed for your dimensions and built one at a time in Santa Cruz.
It is also the piece most often bought badly. A dining table gets chosen from a catalog photograph, arrives at a size that does not quite work for the room, and gets replaced in eight years. The alternative is not more expensive over that span. It is simply paid for once.
We start every table with the material. A slab is stood on edge, looked at, turned, and looked at again until the grain suggests an orientation and a shape. Only then does the design work start, and only then do we know whether this piece of wood wants to be a 96 inch rectangle or a 60 inch round.
Before you talk to anyone about a table, it helps to know roughly what fits. Allow 24 inches of edge per person, and 36 to 42 inches of clear floor between the table and the nearest obstruction so chairs pull out properly.
Standard top height is 29 to 30 inches, with 24 inches minimum of knee clearance underneath. If your chairs are unusually tall or your room is unusually tight, tell us and we will design to it rather than to the convention.
Claro walnut is the shop’s signature: chocolate and amber figure, wild grain, hard enough for daily family use. White oak is tighter and quieter, and the most forgiving surface we build. Salvaged old growth redwood is the most dramatic and the softest, so it records the life of the room; we say so before anyone commits. Bay laurel produces spalted figure you cannot buy commercially. There is more on all four, including how each is sourced, on the wood we use.
Most Trumanmade dining tables land between $6,000 and $20,000. Size matters less than material: a bookmatched pair of figured claro walnut slabs can cost more than the entire rest of the build. Base complexity is the other lever, and a hand shaped pedestal is considerably more work than four legs. You will get an itemized written estimate once the specification is final, and it will not change unless you change the spec.
Available Now
If your timeline is short, start here. These are complete, priced, and ready to crate.
Claro walnut · 60 in round · seats six
Highly figured claro walnut top on a hand shaped pedestal base. Seats six comfortably, eight close. Finished and standing in the shop.
Claro walnut · 84 in table · two benches
Live edge trestle table with two matching benches, built as a set from sequential slabs of the same tree so the grain runs continuously across all three.
Questions we get
Allow 24 inches of table edge per person and 36 to 42 inches of clearance between the table edge and the nearest wall or furniture so chairs can pull out. As a rough guide: a 60 inch round seats six, a 72 inch rectangle seats six to eight, an 84 inch seats eight, a 96 inch seats eight to ten, and a 108 inch seats ten to twelve. Standard height is 29 to 30 inches with at least 24 inches of knee clearance under the apron.
Most Trumanmade dining tables fall between $6,000 and $20,000. The drivers are the slab itself, overall size, base complexity, and whether the top is a single slab, bookmatched, or built up from sequential boards. A live edge bookmatched top in figured claro walnut costs considerably more than a straight edged top in white oak of the same dimensions, because the material does.
Two boards sawn consecutively from the same log, opened like the pages of a book so the grain mirrors across the joint. It doubles your usable width while keeping one continuous figure across the surface. It only works when both halves came from the same log in sequence, which is why we buy slabs in sets and why bookmatched tops cost more.
Three things: the wood has to be dried to the right moisture content for an interior before it is cut, the top has to be flattened and finished equally on both faces so it absorbs and releases moisture evenly, and the base has to attach with hardware that lets the top expand and contract across its width through the seasons. Existing checks are stabilized with butterfly keys or epoxy, chosen deliberately for how the repair should read.
Claro walnut is our default and our signature: hard enough for daily use, deeply figured, and stable once dried. White oak is the choice for a quieter, harder wearing surface. Old growth redwood is the most striking and the softest, so it takes marks. Bay laurel is for clients who want figure that does not exist in commercially milled lumber. We will recommend based on how the table will actually be used, not on what is most expensive.
Yes, and it is a common request. Bring photos of the space, the chairs, and any wood tones you are matching to, along with dimensions. Species and finish get chosen against those, and we make finish samples on the actual wood before anything is committed.
One next step
Rough dimensions and a photo are enough to start. You will hear back within one business day, or call (917) 415-4946.