Building a Live Edge Trestle Table

This was a fun little build, However, I wasn’t sure at first. When the client approached me with this pine slab I was a little leary to take on the job. Pine is not what I would call fine furniture. But the story of the piece had provenance. The client also gave me a fair amount of design leeway which allowed me to mix it with a really beautiful pairing of wenge.

A few years ago, there was a devastating forest fire that ripped through the Black Forest, it burned a lot of homes in the area, and left the landscaped scared. There are dead-standing trees throughout the area. This table was built from one of those dead trees that was slabbed up after the fire for a client that lives in the area. We have made several pieces from this tree. For this piece, I built an entry table and used the live edge pine for the top, and Wenge for the bottom.

It is a traditional Trestle table style, that I sized to fit the entryway for my client’s home. The main joinery holding the table together is a wedge driven through a tusk tenon.

The light-colored pine makes a beautiful contrast to the rich dark reddish-brown of the wenge.