It began, as the best ideas do, over a glass of wine. A love of galaxies, star charts and elegant starships set the course. Two years and much problem-solving later, the Galaxy Table took shape - made to command a vast room like a cruiser at orbit.

Its base is a single sweeping cantilever, 360 kilos of bronze: parts left raw from the sand cast, others hand-polished to mirror, with a rear section of carved timber wrapped in Italian blue leather. Nine months in the making.

The top is fumed eucalyptus, a deep timber sky. We laid a navigation chart across it - curved celestial coordinates in steam-bent ebony, inlaid by hand. One quadrant became a bronzed-brass insert, acid-etched with our solar system and edged with a 75-mm solid brass moulding whose needle-point joint meets timber with impossible precision.

Eighty-six half-millimetre fibre optics sleep beneath the surface until, at the right moment, the Australian night sky appears. And the Milky Way? Rick, our workshop manager, whispered it in with powders of gold, silver and copper - barely there, utterly breathtaking.

It weighs 650 kilos and can be taken apart, but it isn’t meant to move. It’s meant to anchor a home - private, personal - leaving its mark on everyone lucky enough to dine there.