Vintage Green Marble Top Tripod Pedestal Side Table, c. 1955–1985

The Piece

A tall slender tripod stand with a green marble top, the proportion of a candle stand rather than an end table, made to sit beside a chair and hold one lamp or one glass.

The top is the reason to buy it. A disc of green serpentine marble, mid green with dense white calcite veining running across it in seams and dark inclusions scattered through, polished on the face and cut to a clean bevel around the edge. It is a real slab of stone with real figure, not a thin plate over a substrate, and the veining is different from every angle.

Under it the column is a single slender turned shaft, a vase swell below the top narrowing to a run of ring turnings at the waist and again at the foot, finished in a dark red brown. Three cabriole legs spring from the base in a shallow sweep and finish in flat pad feet, the profile cut clean with no carving on the knees.

It stands twenty nine inches on a thirteen inch top. That is a deliberate proportion. Tall enough to serve a chair arm and narrow enough to fit where a normal side table will not.

History & Provenance

The form is borrowed. A tripod stand with a ring turned column, cabriole legs and pad feet is the American Queen Anne candle stand of the middle eighteenth century, and those stands carry wood tops, never stone. The marble topped tripod is a separate tradition, the French gueridon, and the two were married by the American occasional table trade because the combination sold. Weiman of Rockford built a national name on marble tops over turned hardwood bases, and the plant stand and drinks table version of the idea followed it into volume production.

This is that later version, and the build says so. The column is slender and machine turned, the legs are cut from flat stock on a band saw with no carving at the knee, and the marble is finished with a machine bevel rather than a worked moulding. None of it is cabinet shop work and none of it pretends to be.

The materials set the ceiling. The base is solid timber throughout with no veneered board and no cast composition parts, and the top is a genuine serpentine slab rather than the bonded plate or the cultured marble that took over the budget end of the trade. A stand built this way sits before that changeover.

On that evidence it is offered as c. 1955 to 1985. Four things would narrow it: whether a paper or foil maker's label or a stencilled model number survives under the top block or inside a leg, whether the legs are let into the column with sliding dovetails or dowelled, whether the column is one piece of timber or a glued up blank, and whether the disc between the column and the stone is wood or metal.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

A thirteen inch top at twenty nine inches tall is a useful combination and a hard one to find. Most vintage side tables are low and wide, which is wrong for the gap between a chair and a wall, and wrong for a plant that needs to be seen. This one is right for both.

Green serpentine is the easy stone to place. White marble commits a room to a palette and grey marble goes cold, while a green top with white veining sits with mahogany, oak, brass, leather and almost any warm wall without argument, and it comes alive against a deep colour.

The stone also solves the practical problem. A lamp, a glass and a plant all belong on a surface that does not mark, and polished marble takes a wet glass and a pot saucer without the ring a finished wood top gives you. Put it beside a reading chair, in a hall, or in a window where a plant has to stand on something that will not swell.