Coffee tables quietly witness mornings, late-night emails, and weekend calls with people in other cities. Time passes on screens and clocks on walls, but the table itself usually pretends it has nothing to do with any of it. It just holds mugs and magazines while the hours slip by unnoticed. There’s something interesting about furniture that builds time into its structure instead of ignoring it completely.
Michael Jantzen’s Timetables are a series of functional art furniture pieces designed to “celebrate the passage of time.” Four are coffee tables, and one is an end table, all made of wood, metal, and glass, with battery-powered clocks that you can access to change batteries and set the time. They’re meant to be used, not just looked at, even as they behave like small time sculptures.
Designer: Michael Jantzen
The cylindrical coffee table called Local Time has a single large clock embedded at its center under a glass top. It celebrates the local time of wherever it sits, turning the table into a kind of domestic sundial. Every mug, book, or laptop you set down hovers over that one reference point, a quiet reminder that this particular moment is anchored to this particular place.
Two pieces stretch awareness across a country. Four Times is a circular coffee table that carries four clocks, each set to Pacific, Mountain, Central, and Eastern time. Timeline takes the same four zones and arranges them in a long rectangle, like a horizontal strip of the US Both tables make sense in homes or studios that constantly juggle calls and deadlines across those zones.
The square end table called Clock Tower has a disc top and a central rectangular column that holds four clocks, one on each face, again set to the four U.S. time zones. It behaves like a miniature city clock tower pulled into the living room. Walk around it, and you see different times, a small physical reminder that even within one country, the day is staggered in four slices.
International Time is where the series goes global. A larger central clock is surrounded by eight smaller ones, all supported by a cone-shaped column. The center shows local time, while each smaller clock is set to a different major city around the world and labeled accordingly. Sit at this table, and you’re always aware that somewhere else it’s morning, or late at night, or already tomorrow.
Timetables shift clocks from wall-mounted afterthoughts into part of the surfaces you actually use. The restrained white forms, black clock faces, and clear glass tops keep the pieces calm enough for daily life, while the multiple time references quietly expand your sense of where you are in the day. It’s furniture that does what tables do, but also keeps you gently tuned to a wider, ticking world.
The post These Coffee Tables Have Up to 9 Clocks Showing Different Time Zones first appeared on Yanko Design.