Saturn Dining Table, Max Clendinning, Race Furniture, 1966

A rarely available ‘Saturn’ dining table designed by Max Clendinning (1924 – 2020) as part of his Maxima range. Race Furniture produced a limited run of the furniture between 1966 – 1970, the concept being that these pieces could be flat packed, shipped, and slotted together. Clendinning spent time in his father’s factory (a furniture maker himself) in Northern Ireland prototyping furniture to carry on the plane back to London with him. Atop the plywood frame is a ripple-textured rounded-square glass top, resting on rubber strips.

The cut-out shapes are said to have been inspired by the clunky machine-readable numbers designed by Leo Maggs in 1964 – and it is easy to see the correlation in a culture of space-age, pop-art, plastic, and monochromatic minimalism. The ‘Satellite’ dining chairs were designed to sit around the ‘Saturn’, few of which exist. A cupboard on a stand from the same series, said to have been made to retail through Liberty is held in the V & A collection.

“My theory of color is that everything should be the same color. If you have a yellow room, I like the chairs to be yellow, and many other things” he said.

Condition:

Some minor repairs to the glass, and paintwork