Home decorating, interior design ideas, garden design - Homes and Gardens

To be a Royal Designer for Industry (RDI), you must be elected by your peers, and there are only 200 of them at any one time. So a collaboration by two RDIs was destined to be something special. Terence Woodgate is a well-established furniture and lighting designer with a studio in East Sussex, who says he is “a modernist at heart” – hence the thoughtful, understated nature of his work, which has already won prestigious European design prizes. John Barnard, meanwhile, is one of the most innovative racing car designers of his generation and, uniquely, has been technical director/chief designer for both Ferrari and McLaren (though, obviously, not at the same time). He pioneered the use of carbon fibre and introduced the hydro-electronic gearbox. Features now found in cars generally, such as paddles for steering wheels and the automatic clutch, were originally Barnard's ideas.

This dynamic design duo has created Surface, a table so thin it defies belief. The top, a mere whisper of 2mm thick at the edge, is said to be five times thinner than its nearest rival. Although conventionally designed, with a single (albeit stick-thin) leg at each corner, the table has a stupendous span of three metres, making it as impressively long as it is lean. This is a design that seems impossible until you experience its strength and beauty.

The secret is in the layered carbon-fibre construction, borrowed from technology used in racing cars, aeroplanes and boats. For purists, the top can be left the natural colour of its material, charcoal grey, or softened with a walnut veneer. “We were pushing the basic idea of a table as far as we could,” say the designers, “and it became a search for perfection. We spent a long time on the details, and we rounded the legs, corners and edges to accentuate the slimness of the design. The aim of Surface was a new form of seamless blended geometry.” The judges were aware of the table's very high price, but felt its radical use of new materials for a design so daring and accomplished justified its Innovation Award.