I closed my design agency, Fivefootsix, back in 2016. A business I’d run with my friend Mark for 11 years. We’d often held regular ping pong tournaments in our studio space in the evenings. The early days of AoPP. And without a studio, I had nowhere to play. I bought a small table for the garage, and for a while used to hold a few mini-tournaments in there. But as Caroline and myself had children our garage was soon taken over with buggies, cots, hi-chairs, bikes – family stuff. I looked at mini folding ping pong tables. But they are large cumbersome items that are hard to store and ugly when folded away. As big lovers of art and design we decided to explore an alternative solution.

To bring ping pong into our home we had to make it into something we were proud to display, rather than desperate to hide away. So giving the table a secondary purpose became the primary consideration – this duality now sits at the very core of all our ideas at AoPP. We wanted to create a table that was as joyful to look at as it was to play with. And so the ArtTable was born.

The ArtTable is as much an art piece as it is a ping pong table. For the most part, Caroline and I design the artworks. And along our journey, we’ve also been lucky enough to collaborate with some of the world’s most exciting artists and emerging talents to create limited-edition collections. We officially launched them at the London Design Fair in 2019. We’re super proud to say that The Evening Standard picked them for their list of top ten products from the London and Paris design fairs. And since then we have made unique collections for Selfridges, Mr Porter, The Conran Shop and Le Bon Marche.