DESIGN TABLES OF CONTENT

Our lives may lack glamour of late, but not at table. Dinner parties are hot dates again, the proof not only in the pudding but stacked in the china cupboard, tucked into the silver drawer and a-glimmer in the crystal cabinet. It’s tabletop as cause célèbre. Star-status architects, artists, and fashion designers are turning their talents to the table, creating far-more-than-functional forms. Porcelain patterning has become couture, flatware is jewelry. Humility’s in hiding and the dish ran away with the spoon.

But peeking at tables about town, we picked up a more pertinent point: the table has become primary proving ground for individual style. And while Miss Manners’ rules may still apply, tables worth hopping are dressed in delicious departures from the norm, tasty tableaus that mix the cream of tradition with modern classics and pepper it with persona. Tablescaping is the medium; the message your own.

Grass Roots Buffet

Dining at Rudy Esquivel’s is festive, fashionable, fun. His home, like his Dallas gallery, R.E.D., is a compelling composite of folk art, good design, and devil-may-care dash. An avid collector. Rudy snatches a bit of pottery from here and a spoon from there, but his secret lies in the careful cultivation of a concept.

Laying out a piquant buffet, he dazzles guests Southwestern style. His flammable concoction includes vintage Fiestaware pottery, de-lidded sugars serving as soupers, well-bred Steiff silver, and folk-art snakes by Dallas ceramicist Lynn Armstrong. The woven linen napkins were a find in Guatemala, the straw mats in Sri Lanka. The candleholders are hand-blown glass from Merona, Italy.

Rudy’s nod to seasonal celebrations: a turkey by Jose Hernandez Moralez of Santa Fe. The buffet itself, a length of black slate topping white architectural pediments, is from The Nelson Line; the hand-painted chairs are by Charlotte Chambliss. The black and white photography by Lloyd Bird-well is part of an enviable collection.

Romance à la Mode

Last April, Leslie Darden, model (Kim Dawson in Dallas, Eileen Ford in New York) and bon vivant, married Jack Gosnell, partner in a commercial real estate company (the Monitor Group) and bon vivant. And they’ve been busy living happily ever after, ever since.

Establishing home base in the faux-Cape Cod cottage Jack renovated in Oak Lawn, they’ve managed a successful collage of their individual pre-marital furnishings and the sparkling mountain of nuptial loot that came home from the wedding.

Space for entertaining is minimal at the Gosnells’, and the room that would be dining became instead a den/media room. In the living room, an antique Bavarian sled is an everyday table for two, the I’11-take-romance altitude furthered by Leslie’s penchant for multitudinous candlesticks and vase after vase filled with white florals.

Their preferences at table are elegant, welcoming. The pottery is DeGrappa, a tex-tural, double-glazed Italian pattern they found at Gump’s. The generous, white linen napkins are from the Ralph Lauren Home Collection; the Spanish glass goblets from Neiman-Marcus. The Ricci sterling flatware, spotted at The Silver Leopard, makes a simple, classic statement.

Together, like the Gosnells, too pretty, tobe, forgotten.

Eating Art

Dinner at the Whistlers is a tableau of wit and memento, an exuberant celebration of the rare and the humble: family-style. The dad is Barry Whistler, owner of the Barry Whistler gallery in Deep Ellum. The mom is Christy Whistler, fashion coordinator for the visual display department at Neiman-Marcus, and their son is Marley Whistler, who likes recess best at St. John’s Episcopal School.

Each contributes to the tabletop concept, the result a mixed-media rebellion that pushes the borders of tablesetting toward functional art. then pokes fun.

Black serves as pivot point, beginning in the framed art that attends the table: Danny Williams “Provence Study.” a 1978 acrylic on paper (right) and Michael Miller’s 1982 mixed media on paper (left). The theme noir continues in the industrial-strength vinyl placemats Christy found in L.A., echoed by black pottery bowls from Taos, plates from the Waco Art Museum shop. The black wooden chairs are the work of Robert Wilhite of Los Angeles. Suspended above the table, a soft-sculpture figure by Mary Haslip, and two Guatemalan horsehair dolls tantalize the imagination.

The colorplay is irreverent and appealing, Tom Nussbaum’s painted-wood sculpture looks on from one corner in post-modern pastels. Spicy Mexican plates in a Fifties palette are soothed by family silver, Gorham’s “Strassbourg,” and Grandmother’s white damask napkins. Rough-hewn Mexican pottery tumblers were a find at a Fort Worth flea market, the hand-blown blue glass flutes, a must-have at N-M’s French Fortnight.

At home in the ever-changing assemblage: a ceramic Venus from the travels of favored friends, and the small ceramic animals at each place setting carefully selected by Marley from the mini-menagerie in his room. Eating’s art at the Whistlers, and it’s the thought that counts.

A Moveable Feast

The Bloom Agency’s new president and executive creative director, Seth Werner, and friend Jill Haring set a stellar table to suit life in the fast lane. Four months ago, the duo left their hearts and as many home furnishings as they could part with in San Francisco. The idea was to settle into the new four-bedroom manse in the burbs of Piano and follow an organized acquisition plan for furnishings. So far. so good, save one major skirmish with the Dallas shop-’til-you-drop disease.

The arrival of the black lacquered dining table they’d ordered from Eurway was imminent, and except for paper pottery the tabletop cupboard was bare. Exploring The Crescent, they happened upon the Frank McIntosh shop in Stanley Korshak. And there they saw the stuff of which great dinner parties and power tête-à-têtes are made.

They layered linens and mixed V matched pottery. A gaggie of admiring shoppers formed. They selected stems, found flat-ware, and added accessories. Then they gave everything a ride home. And Seth looked upon it and said, “This is good.”

Directions for dinner often call for a smooth segue from kitchen to media madness in the den with dessert at poolside- weather permitting. Pewter trays provide maximum mobility, underscoring pastel buffets and artfully abstract dinner plates and napkins. Sasaki’s matte-black flatware-as-architecture, French crystal stems, and bottle-glass candlesticks add finish. The raisihs? A tasty reminder of the award-winning campaign Seth created for the California Raisin Advisory Council that had animated clay raisins struttin’ their stuff to “Heard It Through the Grapevine.”