UC145
18th Century old beams from British Embassy in Cádiz
350X130X75 CM
Year built
2025
Function
Dining Table
Status
No longer available
Ángel León built Aponiente around a single obsession: finding dignity in what others discard. The restaurant — housed in a centuries-old tidal mill sitting in the middle of a salt marsh at the mouth of the river — has earned three Michelin stars by elevating overlooked marine species, both animal and vegetable, into high gastronomy. In that sense, Aponiente and AMBER speak the same language.
When the commission came to furnish El Secadero — the curing room where León makes his sea charcuterie — we knew the material could only be one thing.
The ancient structural beams we had rescued from a historic eighteenth-century building in Cádiz, the same timber that appears in other pieces in our catalogue, were the only honest answer for a space built around the philosophy of recovered matter elevated to its full potential.
El Secadero is not a conventional restaurant space. It sits outdoors in the middle of the marsh — an unconventional proposition even by three-Michelin-star standards.
The beams needed protection against the elements. We burned them. Not only for durability, but because fire has always carried something more than function — it purifies, it unifies, it reduces a surface to its essential truth. On timber that has already survived three centuries, the burn felt like the right final chapter.
Both top and base are carefully shaped with a sculptural hand. Megalithic in presence, precise in execution.
The bases are formed by two mirrored hook shapes facing each other, spanning a wide footprint without adding unnecessary mass. At the tips, the rotted beam heads are left exactly as they came out of the wall after three centuries embedded in stone — blackened, softened, irreplaceable. A detail that only makes sense if you know where this wood has been.
Four tables born from the same design, shaped by different beams. Not one of them the same.
