Ellie Richards is up in the wood studio this winter, making tables.

She started with one, commissioned for the exhibition Dining and Discourse, curated by Kathryn Hall at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft. One of the exhibition’s aims is to examine how the lavishness of our decorative arts past might surface in today’s “artisanal” and “farm-to-table” dining culture. With this in mind, Ellie designed her table. She painted bands of color on the apron and legs–the shape of the legs riffing on a Queen Anne cabriolet style. “I was thinking about the cover of an album by A Tribe Called Quest,” she says about the polychrome surface. “It had all kinds of geometric shapes working with and off each other.”