130 Blocks, One Floor, and a Table That Lives Outside

When the owners decided to move back to South Africa, they bought and renovated an old house in Rondebosch.

Most of what comes out of a renovation like that goes straight into a skip. Cornices, doors, floorboards - lifted, stacked, and carted off before the new work starts. The parquet came up with everything else.

They didn't want to throw it away. They wanted to make something out of it instead.

130 blocks, and what was on the back of them

What we took delivery of was not a floor. It was 130 loose blocks of hardwood, each one with a skin of black adhesive still stuck to its underside.

Anyone who has lifted old parquet knows this part. The blocks come up easily enough; the bitumen doesn't. It has to come off one block at a time, by hand, and it comes off slowly.

There is no machine for it and no shortcut through it. Before a single piece could be laid, every one of the 130 had to be scraped back to clean timber.

It's the slow, unglamorous start of what turned into a four-week build.

Rebuilding it

The blocks weren't evenly coloured either. Laid out together, they run from pale straw through to deep red-brown, which is what gives the finished top its colour - and it isn't something you can buy. New parquet is graded and matched. This was whatever the original floor layer had to hand, decades ago.

Every block was hand sorted before anything was laid. Which block went where was a decision made multiple times, by eye, on colour and condition - the run of tone across the finished top is the result of that sorting, not of the floor it came from.

Then herringbone. It's an unforgiving pattern: every block sits at ninety degrees to the one beside it, so any error in length or squareness compounds across the surface. None of the blocks were quite the same size. Every one had to be trimmed to fit its neighbour.

Resin and steel

The top is set and filled with Aerontec GreenCast, pigmented black. The black sits in the gaps between blocks and reads as a deliberate line through the pattern rather than a filler, and it ties the top to the steel underneath.

GreenCast is a UV-stable casting epoxy, chosen because this table was always going to live outside. Pigmenting it black helps further: an opaque pour doesn't show ambering the way a clear one does.

The frame is steel, powder-coated black. It carries a solid resin-filled top with no visible support breaking the surface.

Assembled, the table weighs 300 kg. Three metres long, a metre wide, seating ten. It takes four people to lift it, which is why it was never going to be built in the workshop and delivered. We assembled it on site, in the garden, where it now stands.

A word from the owners

The brief was, “can you use the original parquet flooring from our house and repurpose it in an outdoor table please,” but what we ended up with in the finished piece is an exquisite heirloom, a conversation starter, and gathering place for friends and family around which memories are made and held. The design, attention to detail, craftsmanship and even thoughtfulness around how the table will age and weather, are what really distinguish Objekt’s work from other similar makers and designers.