Furniture First, Games Second
A games table arrives in a finished room. The flooring was chosen long before, the joinery was made and the furniture was placed. The usual mistake is to begin the other way round: choose the game, then ask the room to accommodate it. Furniture First. Games Second. is the principle we work to, and it is the reason a table can be made as furniture first and given a game second.
Read in that order, the questions change. They stop being about equipment and become about proportion, sight lines and the materials already in the room.
Working with the Existing Interior
Integration begins with the room itself. Its architecture sets the tone: cornicing, panelling, the height of a ceiling, the depth of a bay. Proportions decide how much table the space will carry. Existing furniture shows where a table can sit without crowding what is already there, and the flooring governs how heavy the piece may feel. A dark walnut cabinet over pale oak boards reads quite differently from the same cabinet over dark stone.
Joinery is the quietest ally. Where a room has been lined in timber, the table can pick up its grain and species, or introduce a deliberate contrast. Lighting matters as much as any material choice: a table sits well where daylight reaches it and where lamplight falls across the surface rather than behind it. Above all, the piece must hold its place in the colour palette and in the sight lines from the door. A table that belongs is one you notice as part of the room, not as a visitor to it.
Where the intention is a whole room given over to play, our guide to designing a luxury games room takes the room as its subject. The subject here is the table.
Choosing the Right Timber for the Room
Timber is where interior integration becomes concrete. American Black Walnut carries warmth and figure, and suits rooms with stone, leather and brass. European Oak is quieter and more architectural, which makes it a natural companion to panelling and cabinetry in the same species. Smoked oak takes the timber to a deeper, cooler brown, useful where a room runs to greys or where a table should recede at the edge of the light. Fumed oak, treated with ammonia so that the colour runs through the board rather than sitting on it, gives a darker tone with the grain still legible.
Each can be matched to existing furniture or set against it, and the finish can answer the floor: an oil that deepens the tone, or a matte lacquer that holds the colour it had on the bench. Our materials pages set out the range, including the leathers and metals that accompany it.
Cloth and Leather as Part of the Palette
Playing cloth is usually treated as a games-table colour and chosen last. It belongs in the palette from the beginning. The cloth is the largest single field of colour on the piece, and it sits beside curtains, upholstery and rugs every day of the week. Choosing pool table cloth is therefore an interior decision as much as a playing one, and the breadth of the Hainsworth range means the cloth can be pitched to the room rather than to a standard.
Leather follows the same logic. It appears on pocket linings, on the rails and in the detail work, where it can echo a chair, a library binding or the handles of the door beside it. Hand-stitched in a colour drawn from the room, it reads as cabinetry detail rather than as sports equipment.
Scale and Proportion in the Room
The presence of the piece is settled by scale and proportion rather than by dimensions alone. A pool table holds the centre of a room and asks for clearance around the playing area, yet its visual weight against the surrounding furniture matters just as much. A shuffleboard, being long and low, behaves like a console or a sideboard. Bar billiards is more compact again.
Position decides how the room will read. Centred beneath a pendant, or aligned with a window, a table becomes part of the architecture. Set at an angle to the floor and to the light, it begins to look temporary.
A Pool Table as a Piece of Furniture
A bespoke pool table is built like a dresser or a sideboard: a cabinet, a frame and a slate bed. That is why it can stand in a drawing room where a conventional table would not. It can sit in a library beneath a run of shelving, hold the centre of an open-plan living space without shouting, and settle into a contemporary interior or a country house drawing room with no dedicated games room at all.
What changes across those settings is the detailing: the line of the cabinet, the carving at the pockets, the height of the rails. What makes a pool table a piece of furniture sets out the construction behind it.
Shuffleboard as a Long Piece of Architecture
A handmade shuffleboard is the easiest of the three to live with in a considered interior, because it is understood at a glance as a long, low piece of furniture. Its cabinet can run with the proportions of a room, along a gallery, beneath a run of windows or opposite a fireplace, and its timber and inlay can be matched to the surrounding joinery. It brings play into a room without the room having to become a games room.
Bar Billiards Where a Pool Table Would Dominate
Bar billiards is compact and played from one end only, so it asks for clearance at the cueing end rather than on all four sides. In rooms where a full-size pool table would take the whole floor, it allows the game to remain without the room being given over to it. Its English heritage answers interiors of brick, stone and panelling, and its proportions keep it close to a console or a writing table in visual weight. Our introduction to what bar billiards is covers the game and its history.
Working with Interior Designers
Many commissions arrive through interior designers and architects, usually while the joinery is still being drawn. That is the right moment. A table resolved alongside the cabinetry can share a species, a finish and a language of detail, and questions of scale, access and lighting are cheaper to solve on paper than on site. We work to a designer's drawings, send samples of timber and cloth for sign-off, and handle access, floor loading and delivery with the project team.
Commissioning a Table for Its Room
A bespoke commission is the reason a table can be integrated rather than accommodated. Timber, finish, leather, cloth and detailing are resolved for one room: the playing surface against the space available, the height of the rails against the seating beside it, the cloth against the curtains, the leather against the door handles. Nothing is chosen from a fixed range, and nothing has to be disguised afterwards.
All three collections can be read in full through the collection pages. Where an interior is already settled and the piece must answer it, that is the work we do.
Earlier in the process, deciding what the room itself should be, games room ideas for luxury homes gathers approaches from intimate snugs to grand entertaining rooms.