If you've been hosting "Moroccan-style" dinner parties on the floor to cover the fact that your condo doesn't have room for a dining table, it's time to come out of the closet. Calligaris Shop [0], a modern Italian furniture line focused on brilliant solutions for small-space entertaining, has a new, 4,000-square-foot showroom in Pioneer Square, offering a dazzling array of extension dining tables, stacking and foldable chairs and more.
Marvel in the line's 27 styles of extendable tables, all with cool mechanisms for opening and closing -- most of which require only a simple flick of the wrist. The Airport ($2,099) hides little wheels underneath the shiny black tabletop -- just give it a tug, and voila, your dining surface area is magically doubled. Airport extends to three sizes, from an intimate 4 feet to an expansive 8 1/2 feet.
You may be wondering where all your new friends will sit. Not to worry. Calligaris Shop also deals in stacking chairs and bar stools, which come in plenty of frame and seat finishes, so you can be "as contemporary or as classic as you want to be," says sales associate Evelyn Lee. Skip ($145) somehow elevates the humble folding chair to a sophisticated seat you won't want to hide in the closet.
Studio dwellers won't want to miss the "occasional furniture" collection of tables. Eleven ($1,049) is a classy frosted-glass affair that has seven different height adjustments, ranging from 16 inches to 29 inches. It can be your laptop desk in the morning, dinner table in the evening, and a coffee table where you can rest your feet while watching a movie at night. Eleven also extends more than a foot lengthwise.
Like the line itself, the showroom is both spare and playful, with vivid red accents and large modern paintings. Visitors can dig into the bowl of fortune cookies at the entrance. The downstairs level features most of the tables and chairs, while a small upstairs room offers wall units, bedroom cabinets and more.
Calligaris Shop is an offshoot of Belltown's modern furniture store Alchemy Collections. "[Alchemy and Calligaris] are kind of like two stores combined -- one's living, one's dining," explains Lee. Calligaris Shop's Seattle showroom is the sixth of its kind in the United States. The others are located in Baltimore, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Philadelphia and Fairfield, New Jersey.
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Copyright © 2008 The Seattle Times Company
