Tablescaping, and the One Rule That Governs All of It

A set dining table. Photo: M F / Unsplash.

Brown Thomas opened its Christmas shop in August. Whatever you think of that, it tells you when the Irish table-dressing season actually begins — and it is now.

Tablescaping has moved from a word people mocked to a small Irish industry with named practitioners, a supply chain and a house style. The house style, it turns out, is restraint.

The rule is Chanel’s

Tara O’Connor runs The Designed Table from Kilteel, near Naas in Co. Kildare. She launched the business in 2021 after nearly three decades in event planning and styling, and works with luxury lifestyle, hospitality, beauty and fashion brands as well as private clients.

Profiled by the Irish Examiner in April under the headline “Tablescaping is my happy place”, her governing principle is borrowed:

Her two practical warnings are about over-styling and about sightlines — the centrepiece that stops two people opposite each other from seeing one another has failed, however good it looks in a photograph.

Where Irish tables are actually bought

The supply chain is more developed than the profile of the trend suggests. Table in a Box is a Dublin company selling table linens and setting accessories. Peacock & Co sells and rents linens and wares; Signature Rentals does bespoke tablescapes and item rental. Avoca functions as a one-stop shop, and Maolisa Murray, its director of marketing, creative and brand, is among the Irish names associated with the trend, alongside Jeni Glasgow in Co. Galway.

On the high street: Dunnes’ Considered by Helen James range, Søstrene Grene, Interiosity, H&M Home and Meadows & Byrne — the last of which has just launched a candle collection explicitly inspired by the Irish landscape.

The gold question, briefly

If you are dressing a table for December, gold is genuinely the colour the Irish trade has decided on — not as an interiors trend, but as a seasonal one. All four of Brown Thomas’s published 2026 Christmas themes use gold: crimson and fir green with gold and white; frosted whites and frozen blues with gold; brown hues with golden accents; pink, burgundy and butterscotch with gold.

That is where gold belongs this year. On a table, for six weeks. Not on a ceiling.

How to do it without buying anything

The through-line of every Irish source on this is that the table you already own is most of the way there. Layer what you have rather than matching a set. Keep everything below eye level. Use one colour and vary its depth rather than introducing three. Light it low — candles, or the cordless lamps O’Connor mentions — because overhead light flattens a table completely.

And then take one thing off.