Collecting the Table: The Mediterranean Lunch Seen from Above

Seen from above, a long table under a pergola: a patterned cloth, plates that do not match, open tins of sardines left as they are, bread, olives, hands reaching in. It is the most pinned interiors image of these past two summers. It rests on no single piece of furniture: it rests on an accumulation of modest objects, chosen one by one.

Where to begin

With the plates, and never with a matching set. Old faience plates, mismatched, at £3 to £8 apiece at a flea market: Sarreguemines, Gien, Digoin, the Italian ones with a coloured rim. Then a cloth, just one, with a bold pattern: printed Provençal cotton, striped linen, madras. Then stemmed bistro glasses, thick, bought by the six for next to nothing. The budget for a first table of ten sits within a hundred pounds or so.

What is worth the detour

The signed faience that holds its value: Richard Ginori and its eighteenth-century patterns, Astier de Villatte (new, between £40 and £90 a plate), the hand-painted studio ceramics of Sicily and Puglia. The blown glass of Biot, its bubbles caught in the mass. And the object this look invented: the tin as a piece of tableware, Portuguese and Spanish sardines and anchovies whose graphics are worth those of a poster. You open them, you set them down, you do not decant.

Where to look

The flea markets of the south and the village car-boot sales, where family china goes by the stack. Hotel and restaurant clearances, for glasses and serving dishes. In Italy, the Sunday mercatini. For the tins, fine grocers and the canneries themselves, which sell online.

How to accumulate it

The rule that holds the image together: a single family of colours, never the same plate twice, and a patterned ground that absorbs the disorder. Nothing is centred, everything is full. The photograph is taken from above, at noon, with hands in the frame: the table is a composition, not a set piece. And you keep everything: it is the collection that builds itself at every meal.

Spotted a plate or a glass on one of these tables? Scan them on Beyit: the manufacturer, the period, what it is worth, and where to find more.