Eating Thin: Extremely Skinny Dining Room Table Design

It seems almost impossible to imagine a dining room table with essentially no surface area – after all, having a flat place to set down your plates and silverware is almost an assumed part of this central and ubiquitous piece of home furniture by definition.

Nilly Landao chose the perspective for her short film featuring this incredibly slim table quite carefully. The viewer is in fact never shown the precise method by which it holds things up, though slots in a vertical wooden surface can be inferred from the images and animation.

The more you see, however, the more it makes you wonder: do we in fact need tables at which to dine? They take up so much space right in the heart of a home. While we might think of them as a core gathering place within a house, is there any reason it cannot be a nearly two-dimensional line with a slight vertical plane rather than a massive three-dimensional surface around which we sit?