The Floating Stone – Antique Limestone & English Oak
A slab in search of a purpose
The project began with an unusual starting point: the client had already acquired an antique limestone slab – a piece of considerable age, character, and weight – and needed someone with the vision and skill to transform it into a functional outdoor table. She had been told that David Leviatin of London Timber Frame was “up for crazy jobs.” She called.
What followed was not simply a matter of building a base. The challenge was to create a structure worthy of the stone – one that honoured its antiquity, revealed its presence, and yet appeared, paradoxically, to hold it effortlessly aloft.
"That's when my brain got working - I came up with the idea of creating four oak legs the inside tops of which would follow the Ovolo profile of the limestone table edge in reverse."
Profile meets counter-profile
The limestone’s edge carried a classical Ovolo moulding – a convex quarter-round profile used in architecture and stonework for centuries. Leviatin’s insight was to carve its precise inverse, the Cavetto, into the top of each oak leg. Where the stone swells outward, the oak curves inward to receive it.
This is not simply a decorative flourish. The interlocking profiles distribute the considerable weight of the slab. approaching two tonnes, across a wide bearing surface, while creating a clean visual line where stone and timber meet. No metal fixings are visible. No gap betrays the junction. The stone appears simply to rest, as though it always belonged there.
Three details that make the whole
- Cavetto Carving
Each of the four oak legs was hand-carved with a Cavetto profile — the concave inverse of the limestone’s Ovolo edge moulding. The profiles were matched precisely to cradle the slab and distribute its load. - Pegged Mortice & Tenon
The rails connecting the legs are joined with traditional mortice and tenon joinery, secured with exposed oak draw-bore pegs — visible from the outside as a deliberate mark of craft, not concealed as a structural necessity. - Underground Engineering
Leviatin notes there is “a lot going on underground” — the base and fixing system is engineered to handle the extraordinary mass of the antique limestone while presenting a composition of apparent weightlessness above ground.
Antique Limestone
A reclaimed slab of considerable age, carrying the Ovolo moulded edge characteristic of English architectural stonework. Surface texture and patina are original. Weight: approaching two tonnes.
English Oak
Kiln-dried sawn oak sourced from Studley Yard. As the timber dries over time it will silver to a tone that complements the pale limestone – a deliberate material pairing. Leviatin has worked with the same yard for fifteen years.
Weight, and the illusion of its absence
What makes this piece quietly remarkable is the tension it resolves. The limestone is ancient, immovable, almost geological in its presence. The oak is fresh-cut, warm, alive with grain. The two ought not to belong together – yet the Cavetto joint makes their meeting appear inevitable, as though one material was always waiting for the other.
David Leviatin’s brief was to make the stone appear to float. In that, entirely, he succeeded.
Leviatin specialises in the design and manufacture of custom made tables, benches and chairs, using Vastern Timber – londontimberframe.com
