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Minimalist room with a long table and red lamp
Process · 6 min read ·

The long table, revisited

Eleven years after the first one, we went back to the drawing for the table that started the studio — and changed almost nothing.

The first Halden object was a table. It was three metres long, made from four oak boards and two trestles, and it lived in a borrowed workshop in Skanderborg for the first year of the company. We have made roughly four hundred since.

This spring we took the original drawings out again, partly out of curiosity and partly because a customer asked whether the 2015 version would still match one bought today. The honest answer was: almost. The boards are now quarter-sawn rather than flat-sawn, which stops the cupping we saw in the earliest tables. The trestle wedge is two millimetres thicker. Everything else is the same.

What we did not change

The temptation with a revisit is to add. A cable tray, a drawer, a second finish. We tried each of them in the workshop and took each of them out again. The table works because it is a surface and a stand and nothing else. Anything you add becomes the thing you notice.

Close-up of oak grain
Quarter-sawn oak shows the medullary rays that flat-sawn boards hide.

“The best change we made in eleven years was the one nobody will see.”

Jonas Kjeldsen, workshop lead

So the 2026 table ships with the thicker wedge, the quarter-sawn top and the same three-metre reach. If you own an early one, the wedges are interchangeable — write to us and we will send a pair.

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