The luxuriously smooth, shiny Red Baron–red top rests on rich, graham-cracker–colored tapered legs. The X-shaped base and legs are joined together with a curved half-lap dovetail — a joint you couldn't cut with a chisel. These lively tables brighten up the lush, green garden bar they live in like blooming flowers on the cactus that surround them.
Designed for the garden bar at Resident, whose owners came to Andrew wanting outdoor tables with metal legs and a wood top. Andrew talked them into the reverse: an aluminum top, powder-coated in a red he called Red Baron, sitting over legs of reclaimed Douglas fir. Aluminum weathers a powder coat far better than steel, which rusts underneath and eventually lets the finish fail — and turning the assembly upside down means the metal top also shields the wood legs beneath it from sun and rain.
The joinery is a locking, CNC-cut curved dovetail set into a half-lap cross for support — a joint Andrew invented for this run of twelve tables, assembled with glue and a few taps of a hammer, the curve of the dovetail pulling each leg fully into place with almost no clamping needed. Steel mounting tabs, drilled for pegs, were welded to the underside of each top before powder coating; they seat into CNC-cut mortises in the cross support and are pegged with wood, with no metal fasteners anywhere in the finished table. The Douglas fir itself was salvaged from a dump in the 1980s by George Rollins, who stored it for years before donating it to Resident's owners for this run, and the legs are finished with Sutherland Welles outdoor tung oil.
Ten years on, the tables are still in daily outdoor use. The legs have taken on a dark, almost graphite patina from the bar's trap-rock garden floor, and the powder-coated tops are still bright Red Baron red, with only a few small chips and no rust. Per the owners, these are the only original pieces from their opening buildout that have held up — outlasting a set of German-made beer garden tables in the same space by five years, and counting.
This piece has a bar sibling: the Red Baron Ping Pong Table, built the same year in the same finish — in fact made first. A year later, the same base reappeared with a curved top on the Flow Coffee Table, likely the closest thing the family has to a sister piece.