A console table or hall table can really set the tone of your home. It adds practical gravitas to that connecting space, which links up the many rooms in your home. The hall, usually, opens out to the entrance to your home, so that it provides an important first impression for visitors. What does your exposed hallway, currently, say to those people standing on the threshold of your house or apartment? Is it making the right impression? Do you have a hall table of the correct stature to make a statement?

Hall Tables Set The Tone Of Your Home: A How To Guide

There is a wonderful tome entitled, House Therapy, which is all about the psychological meanings of rooms within our homes. This handy book identifies the spaces within our domestic abodes and how they relate to parts of our personalities or our distinctive characteristics. The hallway is very much associated with our outer expression of ourselves, what we show the world and how the world judges us. Our homes are another skin we wear and the things that we display there, tell others about ourselves.

Your hall table should be set against a wall, perhaps, a mirror could stand above it, reflecting out a view of multiple aspects of your home. It is best left uncluttered and a setting for something definitive like a piece of art, statuette or sculpture. It may serve as a temporary station for your perusal of the daily mail, it may hold a telephone, or, perhaps, even, a computer screen in this day and age. It is not an intimate station, rather, an intermediary space between the outer realm and your inner sanctuary.

The hall table sets the tone for what visitors can expect, when they enter your home. It is a staging post to vet the missives from the outer world. There is a decided neutrality about the hallway table, somewhat like Switzerland during WWII. It does not give too much away about who you are and what actually goes on in your home. It is one of the few remaining formal structures in an increasingly informal world. Form and structure can protect us, both physically and psychologically. The hall table can be the place where we open potentially unsettling communications from beyond our borders. It should be elegant without being too feminine, it needs some outer show of strength to be effective in its role.