The best coffee tables to get you through summer

Choosing a coffee table is harder than it looks. More likely to take the same beating as your dining table, it needs to serve its purpose as everything from a footstool and impromptu table to keeper of the remote controls and, well, coffee table books. As a focal point in your living room, it has to complement your lounge in style and materiality, as well as working with the shape and size of your room, all without compromising functionality. Nothing to it, right?

To get you started, we’ve assembled our top six coffee tables. They’re a diverse range, from well known (and not so well known) classics, to space savvy, contemporary solutions versatile enough to suit any living room style.

Noguchi Coffee Table

Japanese American designer Isamu Noguchi took his inspiration from nature to create this classic coffee table from Vitra using just three elements to create a perfectly balanced structure. It has never gone out of style since it was released in 1944, $4,760 from Living Edge

Rondo Pouffe Table

This clever design, which allows for three perfectly sized pouffe seat to store below is from Adelaide based TH Brown, legendary mid century Australian designers and manufacturers. The Rondo Pouffe table was only re-released last year and is $2,500, including glass top from TH Brown

Nakashima table

Another re-release, the Nakashima table designed in the 1940s by George Nakashima, has splayed tapered legs to give this table from Knoll a modernist edge, $8,110 from dedece

Drop Leaf SideTable

A little short on space? No problem. The design of the drop leaf side table by Hvidt & Mølgaard, the latest designers to join the fold at &Tradition, allows it to be folded up when not in use. Released in 1956, it’s refined form makes it ideal for apartments, as a side table or any small space where a stylish table would look at home, from $3,630 from Cult

Artie Wave table

Looking to anchor your living space? This solid table could be just what the designer ordered. Suitable for use inside or out, the curved lines of the versatile Artie Wave table soften its heavyweight status, $2,875 from GlobeWest,

Wild Child table

Transparent furniture is useful in smaller spaces where a larger table might feel too oppressive. Ditch the clear glass options with the Wild Child table, made from holographic acrylic in rainbow colours, $750 from Fenton&Fenton,

“Call us optimists. Call us dreamers. Call us whatever the hell you want, but we’re betting on people, and we like those odds. The future is for everyone.”

That ad copy is from the voice-over of a July Meta Platforms META -3.38%.

spot that’s been part of a public-relations blitz to position Meta as the humanist AI company. The message was undercut by the ad’s inclusion of David Bowie’s “Five Years,” a brooding 1972 song about an impending apocalypse. But this week CEO Mark Zuckerberg left no ambiguity, publishing a 6,500-word manifesto—about 10 times the length of this newsletter—with a title that echoed the ad: “The Future is for Everyone.”

That seems to be Meta’s new tagline. In light of sinking public opinion and the company’s thousands of lawsuits from states, school districts, parents, and users, Meta’s public relations have been defensive. This push represents a return to offense, with a chance to distinguish Meta’s approach to AI from other labs like OpenAI, Anthropic, or SpaceX SPCX +9.65%.

“It is surprising that the discourse from many developing AI is so filled with doom,” Zuckerberg wrote. “I do not understand why anyone who believes that AI will eliminate most jobs and much of humanity’s relevance would rush to build that future.”

Zuckerberg frames what sort of future we build with AI as the central issue of our time. “We believe that delivering superintelligence to everyone is the way to answer this question,” he says. “This has the potential to begin a new era of personal empowerment where individuals can use this powerful new capability to reach their full potential, pursue their interests, and improve their lives and the world more than ever before.”

The flood of words belies the situation on the ground in mid-2026. Americans, at least, have a love-hate affair with social media. A November Pew Research Center poll reported that 71% of U.S. adults used Facebook, and 51% used Instagram. Worldwide, 3.6 billion people use at least one Meta app every day.

But in a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted in July and August, 61% of respondents said they wanted more government oversight of social media, and two-thirds supported laws to keep children under 16 years old off the platforms. When it comes to Meta in particular, in the 2026 Axios Harris 100, an annual poll about corporate reputation, Meta placed 96th out of 100. It’s only above two other social media companies, Chinese ultracheap retailer Temu, and Spirit Airlines, a defunct air carrier. Regarding ethics, Meta came in last, and it was only ahead of TikTok in trust.

The steady drip of headlines in the teen social media trials isn’t helping. Last week, Meta lost a judgment in New Mexico state court that raised their liability in that relatively small jurisdiction to nearly $1 billion dollars. On Wednesday, jury selection began for a federal case with four states suing Meta over addictive product design, and false marketing that said its platforms were safe for teenagers. In July, Meta claimed that the states are asking for a total of $1.4 trillion in damages, in addition to design changes in the apps. This is part of a multidistrict litigation, where thousands of federal trials with social media defendants are coordinated in Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers’ district courthouse in Oakland, Calif.

There is a separate such group of thousands of cases in California state court, mostly with individual plaintiffs. The steady drip of bad headlines from the courts will continue unless Meta decides to settle en masse.

Meanwhile, in the second quarter, Meta booked “$2.40 billion of charges related to legal proceedings,” according to its quarterly filing. That may be just the beginning.

Zuckerberg spent 6,500 words getting his utopian message out, but I can sum it up in two: Trust us. The evidence is that Meta has a long way to go to win back that trust.