Tripod Coffee Table – Jos de Mey

• • Tripod coffee table by Jos de Mey for Luxus, Belgium, 1957.

• Black lacquered beech structure.
• L 80 cm x D 80 cm x H 49 cm.
• Good overall condition, slight traces of use.
• Bibliography: Het Mechelse Meubel 1500–2000, OKV, p. 110.

A Jos de Mey tripod coffee table, between design and graphic rigour

This tripod coffee table attributed to Jos de Mey belongs to the context of post-war Belgian design, marked by a quest for balance between functionality, construction and legibility. A singular figure in Flemish creation, Jos de Mey was designer, colour theorist, interior architect and artist.

Trained at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent, where he later taught interior architecture and colour harmony, he developed in the 1950s and 1960s a practice that linked furniture, composition and visual reflection. Alongside Belgian designers such as Alfred Hendrickx, Willy Van Der Meeren and Lucien Engels, he was part of the generation that gave Belgian design a sober, structured and resolutely modern identity.

The tripod base gives this coffee table an immediate graphic presence. This three-point construction reflects a search for visual stability as much as lightness, in a formal vocabulary consistent with Jos de Mey’s interest in space, geometry and proportional relationships. Long before his pictorial work was recognised for its perspective play and impossible constructions, his work in furniture already demonstrated an acute sensitivity to constructed forms.

Through its clear design and balanced silhouette, this coffee table evokes a cultivated Belgian modernism, where elegance arises less from ornament than from the precision of lines. A piece that naturally finds its place in an interior seeking sobriety, character and quality provenance.