Designer DIY

At one time or another, most of us have been furniture designers. We’ve taken cinder blocks and wood boards to make—voilà!—a makeshift bookshelf, or stacked old suitcases to improvise a bedside table. The Milan-based, French-born designer Philippe Nigro has drawn on that DIY impulse, devising adjustable steel legs that, combined with the tabletop of your choice (an old door, say, or reclaimed floorboards), create a trestle table with an industrial edge. It’s a radically straightforward idea that Nigro thinks will have particular resonance for sustainability-minded consumers. “There is nothing wasteful—all the material used in the production is necessary,” he says of T.U. (short for Table Universelle). For those who have left their furniture-making days behind them, the manufacturer, Ligne Roset, offers a range of refined wood tabletops, which, according to Nigro, lend a “domestic” warmth to “the essential and industrial metal legs.” Here he offers a detailed tour of his caliper table.