Sustainable furniture brand Sabai has shifted from its upholstery roots, releasing the City Table. The City Table is made in partnership with Cambium Carbon, which sources fallen urban trees from Baltimore (that would otherwise end up in a landfill) for the table's solid ash top.
According to Phantila Phataraprasit, Sabai's Co-founder, she and her co-founder met Cambium Carbon's founders "through a pitch competition put on by NYU and Yale (two of their co-founders are Yale grads) and we were in love with their project. When we heard their pitch, we knew that we had to work with them."
The Sabai team is "constantly looking for innovative partners to help make our products more sustainable and reduce landfill waste," Phataraprasit continued. "By partnering with Cambium, we're helping make our products more sustainable and supporting other businesses that are changing the industry and the world! Using reclaimed wood means that we're not harvesting trees and sequestering carbon at the same time." One of the challenges of using salvaged material is that "there isn't a supply chain outlet that is repeatable or scalable," she said. Cambium Carbon works with different mills and tries to "facilitate the connection because these materials often have a hard time finding a repeatable use. The ash is cut specifically for the tables by a manufacturing team in South Carolina, Phataraprasit noted. They "knew lengths and widths in the onset and can eliminate or minimize waste" as there is "lots of waste usually associated in generating planks of wood that are perfect."
The City Table has round corners and round legs to soften the reclaimed wood aesthetic. "Sabai's customers have been asking for more products and we thought it was a natural compliment to our seating line" Phataraprasit said. Many of its customers "buy multiple products (for example sofa, chair, ottoman) from Sabai, so we’d love to one day outfit their entire home — the coffee table is the next option in a growing line up."
As their first foray into non-seating items, "we wanted to create a product that spoke to our customer — modern, convenient, stylish, and sustainable'" said the company's co-founder. "To keep it modern and stylish, we wanted to keep the lines simple and clean. We also wanted to incorporate a new material — steel — to bring in a more contemporary edge. The steel is also made from recycled and recyclable steel so it’s environmentally friendly as well."
The legs are made in North Carolina from recycled steel, which is "a continuously recyclable material." The steel is bent into shapes in a mold and the steel sheets are pressed into that shape. The legs will be available in Slate, Bone, and Sage.
