A table with a past: restoring a 130-year-old Riley

The first time I saw Lucie's table it stood there dark and heavy: stained almost black, with a worn classic green cloth on top. On the rail was a name — E.J. Riley Ltd, Accrington — stuck on as a plain little label, no longer the original. Two things no longer suited her, Lucie told me straight away: that heavy, dark colour and that label.

The stain itself turned out not to be a century old. At some point, at her parents' request, the wood had been darkened — but before that the table wore its own natural oak colour. That was exactly the colour Lucie wanted back: in her vintage-modern interior the heavy, dark finish simply felt too bulky.

Normally I work at the customer's home — I drive out, and that is usually enough. But bringing this wood back to its original colour meant stripping it completely and sanding it by hand, and that is not something you do in someone's living room. So for once I dismantled the table and took it to my own workshop.

It became evening work. After my days at customers I came home, ate, and started sanding. Several evenings in a row, spread over a few weeks, until the oak under that stain showed its own warm colour again. The load-bearing beams underneath — a kind of pine — got a matt black coat of paint and the sort of varnish used on boat decks, so they can take what a lifetime of being carried brings with it.

I did not simply put the name label back. I redrew “E.J. Riley Ltd” in the original typeface on the computer and had that name engraved into the wood with a laser printer — more authentic than the sticker that was on it, and a detail that does justice to where this table comes from.

Riley itself started in 1897 as an ordinary English sports shop in Accrington and soon began building tables of its own — by the 1920s one of the largest table makers in England. The company no longer exists: it went bankrupt in the early 2000s, and the brand name passed to others afterwards. So this table has nothing to do with the “Riley” of today — it is one from the real, original house.

One last step is still to come: the pockets will soon get a subtle upgrade to a leather look instead of the original nets — modern enough to look good, careful enough to damage nothing of the original.

This is exactly why I like doing this work. Not every table that comes to me is new, and not every table has to be — sometimes the finest thing you can do is let a piece of history play the way it was meant to.