In lockdown and beyond, people began to nest in whole new ways, with some joining the trend to dress up their dinner table – or even just their dinner tray – in eye-poppingly elaborate and entertaining ways
In August, Dawn Batten, who runs an interiors Instagram account focusing on thrift and upcycling, found herself layering her favourite willow-pattern crockery with blush-pink bowls and plates from Poundland. “It was just me playing around with layering the plates to see what I could create from what I had,” she says. She didn’t know “tablescaping” was a term until she looked for a hashtag for the resulting picture. “I was hovering on one leg to take that photo,” adds Batten, which is classic tablescaping behaviour.
Layering crockery is classic tablescaping, too. As it sounds, tablescaping is “a decorative arrangement of ornaments or other objects on a tabletop”. For the past few years, the trend – and the posting of the pictures of your dinner table groaning with tasteful crockery, candles and other accessories online – has mushroomed.