Material Object: Beverly Nguyen

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Material Object: Beverly Nguyen

Material Object: Beverly Nguyen

As told to Joshua David Stein. Illustrations by Lucilla Tubaro.

When I opened my second pop-up store last spring, my friend Louis Rambert and I designed a table that sat in the space in Rockefeller Center under a glowing globe-shaped Japanese lamp. The table itself has an oak veneer top with a lighter Danish stain for the base. It’s minimal but monumental, like a work by Donald Judd. Even though it was just a pop up, it felt kind of vulnerable creating a store, letting people into what physically represents what my insides look like. But stores do that.

Each item from a bamboo spider strainer to a pepper grinder represented a passion, a story, a memory from my life. And this table was at the heart. So after the pop-up ended, the table made its way to my loft right in the Lower East Side. In the store, the table was a counter, a register, an anchor. Now in my living room, the table is the heart. It is like a portal into the world of ideas and a parade of moments. Around the table, I’ve hosted a dinner party for eight. And a dinner for one, a baby shower, and hours and hours of conversations and silence. Obviously I do not lack for homewares but the table—the space it commands and the space it offers—is something special.

“And what I learned, something etched so deeply within me I wasn’t conscious of it, is that tables, like families, offer a lifetime of support but only when they rest on a strong solid base.”

Though it didn’t occur to me at the time I designed it, the table is not too different from the one I grew up with. My parents—Vietnamese refugees who met at aged 23 on the boat to America—settled in Orange County, California, where I grew up. They created their family, my family, around that dining table. I learned how to cook around that dining table, Vietnamese dishes like tamarind-flavored canh chua, clay pot dishes featuring rice, pickled vegetables and an array of chilis and seasoning. I learned about the power of family and the power of food around that dining table. And what I learned, something etched so deeply within me I wasn’t conscious of it, is that tables, like families, offer a lifetime of support but only when they rest on a strong solid base.