Monday morning. The rst autumn frost. We are sitting around a table in the Treku o ces in an eminently rural setting just three kilometres from the Cantabrian Sea.
The table in question is a Treku Aise, with metal legs. The encounter is somewhat paradoxical because at one end of the Aise is Ibon Arrizabalaga, the designer who came up with the idea and then turned it into a reality, and at the other end is Silvia Ceñal, also a designer and the creator of another table for the Zarautz rm, called Basoa. We are obviously here to talk to them about tables, these pieces of furniture that are born from the union of a at top and legs. So simple, yet so complex.

The philosopher Gustavo Bueno once wrote that tables are ‘ oors for hands’, a space created to enable our upper extremities to express themselves, or to simply rest. Tables are a canvas on which to live our creative life, and our everyday life. Tables are also a startlingly simple design that even a child would be able to create. And yet, every year, new designs are born with new nuances. Silvia’s Basoa table was created in a burst of inspiration. ‘You pick up a piece of paper, a pencil, and you start with a line; then you add another…’ No pressure, no impulse to ll a gap in the market, no speci c destination in mind. Created for the mere pleasure of it. Later on, a prototype was produced for her exhibition and it was this that seduced Treku and convinced the brand to include the table in its collection.

The inspiration for the name Basoa (which means forest in Basque) came from the large pine trees that cover the sand dunes in Landes, in the south of France. ‘I like working on pieces with a lot of detail. In the case of Basoa, these details can be found in the crosspieces and the way in which they join together.’ The Aise table, on the other hand, was created in an almost diametrically opposed fashion. Ibon Arrizabalaga is a Treku designer who is extremely familiar with the rm’s pro- duction processes and is well aware of the direction in which designs should be heading.

Initially, Aise was conceived as an o ce desk with a Treku touch: visually light and eminently contemporary, with metal legs to guarantee stability. It was created to order, a design rooted in a speci c set of requirements. But it proved hugely successful. And not only as a piece of o ce furniture. Orders soon came in requesting it for the home environment also. ‘We evolved the design towards a warmer, more homely look, replacing the metal legs with solid wooden ones.’ Basoa, born free, and Aise, a made-to-order design which then chan- ged course, exist side by side in Treku’s new collection. They are not just any old tables, simple yet complex, they are the future oor for thousands of hands.