A Telephone for a Table

War teaches us to measure mornings in sirens and cities in shelters. This week, an old table reminded me that survival also requires gathering together.

Hi, you may have noticed that I failed to appear in your inbox this morning.

Kyiv had several Russian rockets to receive, an appointment nobody had put in the diary, so I welcomed them in the traditional manner, with a cup of tea and a considerable amount of shock.

Once the city had settled, I returned to my Monday architectural work and used the pauses between drawings to stitch a few letters into words, and the words into the story I had promised you for every Monday.

Today is also my final day at work, which means that my job and the conscription deferment attached to it are ending together. From tomorrow, I shall be unemployed until I find my next position, and rather more visible to the military bureaucracy than one generally hopes to be.

Apparently, rockets, redundancy and conscription paperwork have formed a small committee to organise my week. Their planning is impressive, although I dislike the brief.

So I am a little late, slightly shaken and still negotiating with the kettle, but I am here. Between my final drawings, an uncertain tomorrow and the occasional unwanted object crossing Kyiv’s airspace, I am doing my best to keep telling you what life and architecture look like from inside the city.

Before you continue, please pause for a moment and inspect the graphic below. There I am, sitting at my old oak table with tea, architectural drawings and a kettle that appears more emotionally stable than its owner, while Kyiv deals with another morning of aerial interruptions. Once you have confirmed that the table is still standing and the architect remains broadly operational, scroll down. I will tell you how my week began with rockets, wandered through cats, basements, an antique table, Georgian food, friendship and a dinner party, and ended on a Monday with no job, no conscription deferment and, rather heroically, some tea still left in the cup.

At 7.30 this morning, an air raid alert lasted for eleven minutes, which was almost exactly enough time for me to clean my teeth and make tea.

Kyiv has developed an alarming talent for fitting war into the domestic timetable.

Today, however, I want to tell you about the things that inspired me and lifted my spirits during the past week. There will still be an air raid, naturally. This is Kyiv, and apparently no story is permitted to begin without one. But there will also be an antique table, several cats, a mysterious guardian of a basement, khinkali, music, friendship and rather more pasta than architectural journalism usually requires.

When I was a child, long before I suspected that architecture and interior design would become my profession, I spent my weekends rearranging the furniture in my bedroom.

Other children may have rested. I conducted ergonomic experiments.

Each arrangement suggested another possibility. Moving the bed changed the relationship with the window. Moving the desk altered the light. A chair placed in one corner created somewhere to read, while the same chair placed elsewhere became an obstacle that attacked my shin after dark.

I once dismantled my chair-bed completely. I threw away its main structure and kept only three upholstered sections with wooden frames. I did not yet know that modular sofas existed, but ignorance did not prevent me from attempting to invent one.

I placed the sections in a line when I wanted to lie down. I raised one section to form a backrest when I wanted to read beneath the window. I stacked them when I needed another seat.

The furniture changed according to the life I wanted the room to support.

I now understand that these rearrangements were partly design exercises and partly a form of psychological care. Whenever something changed inside me, I changed the room around me. Sometimes the transformation began with a feeling. Sometimes it began because a computer or a new table arrived and demanded territory.

Last week, those childhood memories returned while I was rearranging my kitchen and living room.

The room has acquired a new zone, a study.

I placed it close to the balcony doors, partly because the light is good and partly because I frequently go onto the balcony to smoke. A responsible architect might have designed the study around concentration and productivity. I appear to have designed mine around efficient access to cigarettes.

No study is possible without a desk, and this particular desk was the reason the entire room had to change.

It is an old oak table with a veneered top and substantial carved legs. It is already several decades old, perhaps more. A central section can be removed to shorten it or inserted when more space is needed.

I kept the central section in place because it now performs an additional and unexpectedly precious function. It is flat.

The table had spent years in a damp room. Moisture had cracked the veneer and raised parts of the surface into waves. Using a computer mouse across it feels rather like navigating a small boat through rough water.

The central panel survived in better condition. My mouse now occupies that narrow territory of stability while the rest of the desk waits to be restored.

Its imperfections do not annoy me. They reveal what happened to it. The cracks record dampness, neglect and time. Restoration should not erase that history completely. It should make the table useful again without forcing it to pretend that nothing happened.

That is a question Ukraine will face repeatedly in the years ahead.

How do we repair what has been damaged without removing the evidence of what it survived?

The story of how this table entered my flat began on Tuesday morning, after another massive Russian attack during the night.

I went for a walk through Kyiv. I wanted coffee, a conversation with my mother on the telephone and several photographs of the facade of a building I am researching.

Near the building, I met a man feeding the local cats.

Something inside me suggested that I offer him a cigarette. I did, and for the purposes of this story I will call him the Spirit of the Basement.

He told me that he had lived in the basement for more than ten years, protecting the historic building from looters and watching over its remaining fabric.

The House Kyiv Has Not Yet Lost

The neglected Friedrich Michelson building in central Kyiv, where broken windows, exposed brickwork and encroaching vegetation exist beside remarkably intricate surviving ornament. Behind its damaged facade remains the evidence of another Kyiv, and the reason one man has spent years guarding it against looters.

The House Kyiv Has Not Yet Lost [Photographs by Hryhorii Afanasiev]

Our acquaintance began with cats and cigarettes, which is not the conventional procedure for architectural research but has often proved more effective than an appointment request.

We spoke about the neglected building, Kyiv’s history, architecture and various social initiatives. Several hours later, I was sitting inside his basement and talking with him about life and the Friedrich Michelson apartment building¹.

Then he showed me what he called an artefact.

It was the oak table.

He told me that it had been given to him by a grandson of Borys Paton and that Paton had once worked at it. Borys Paton was a Ukrainian engineer, materials scientist and one of the country’s most important organisers of scientific research.

I cannot yet verify the table’s complete provenance, so for now I hold the account as a story entrusted to me, waiting for documents to catch up.

Still, I was captivated.

Perhaps it was the history attached to it. Perhaps it was the carved oak beneath the damaged veneer. Perhaps I simply recognised another object that had survived long enough to deserve a second life.

I asked the Spirit what he intended to do with it.

He said he hoped to organise an auction.

“What would you like for it?” I asked.

“I need a mobile telephone with internet access, so that I can continue my research,” he replied.

“All right. Let us meet tomorrow before lunch. I will bring you one.”

At 11.45 on Wednesday morning, I arrived at the agreed place holding a working touchscreen telephone.

I gave it to the Spirit.

Instead of signing a contract of sale, we smoked a cigarette together.

This may not satisfy every lawyer, but it was concise, mutually understood and required considerably less paperwork than most architectural agreements.

I asked a friend to help transport the table to my flat. Only the sections of the tabletop fitted inside his Lanos. The lower structure, made from solid oak, had to be carried by hand.

Fortunately, I live about ten minutes away.

Unfortunately, oak does not become lighter simply because the destination is nearby.

The Spirit offered to help. We lifted the base and began carrying it towards my home in short bursts. The heat was extraordinary. We moved from the shade of one tree to the next, resting beneath each crown before continuing.

For those few minutes, the city revealed another kind of architecture.

The route was not measured in metres. It was measured in shadows.

Beneath my building is a Georgian restaurant, so I suggested that we celebrate the acquisition with khinkali² and khachapuri³.

After lunch, we returned to our separate tasks. The Spirit went to acquaint himself with his new telephone. I went upstairs to begin cleaning several decades of history from my new desk.

By Saturday, the table was ready for company.

On 8 August, I held a dinner at home and invited friends to help raise donations for a mobile workshop that will service weapons used by Ukrainian defenders.

The programme was simple.

I would prepare my signature tuna pasta. We would eat, talk and introduce people who had not met before. Afterwards, I would give a lecture about Kyiv’s historic architecture from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, using archive images alongside photographs of the buildings as they appear today.

Music by Ukrainian composers from the same period played quietly in the background.

I had not enjoyed a day off so completely for a very long time.

I watched conversations begin at one end of the table and travel to the other. New connections formed between people who had arrived as strangers. My friends listened to the lecture with bright eyes, asked questions, offered corrections and added details that enlarged the story.

This is how knowledge should feel.

It should not be delivered from one person to a silent room. It should move around the table, collect other people’s memories and return richer than it began.

When I told them the story of the table, they were pleasantly astonished. I may even have detected a little good-natured envy in several pairs of eyes.

Architects are trained to observe subtle changes in expression. This is useful when presenting a project and invaluable when showing friends an antique oak table acquired for the price of a telephone.

That evening, I also played them my new piano composition.

The room that had begun the week as a kitchen and living room had become several places at once. It was a dining room, lecture hall, music room, meeting place and temporary fundraising venue.

This is what I mean when I say that architecture is not simply the arrangement of walls.

A room becomes meaningful through what people are able to do inside it.

The dinner must have been successful because my guests remained until 11.30, only half an hour before curfew began.

Nothing brings a Kyiv gathering to an efficient conclusion quite like the knowledge that the entire city is about to become legally unavailable.

After everyone left, the glasses, plates and chairs remained as evidence of the evening. The old table stood at the centre of it all.

A week earlier, it had been in a damp basement. Now it had carried dinner, wine, architectural history, a fundraising effort, new friendships and music.

The table had not merely entered another room. It had recovered its purpose.

The old oak table in its new life inside my Kyiv flat, first as a desk, then as an architectural workspace, and finally as a gathering place for food, friendship and ideas. Its cracked veneer still carries the years it spent in dampness, but around it, something new has already begun.

The Table Begins Its Second Life [Photographs by Hryhorii Afanasiev]

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If you would like to keep my spirits, and this workshop, alive, please consider a donation or a €5 monthly subscription.

That evening helped me understand what I want to build around Maisternia.

I want to gather a proactive intellectual community whose members can grow together, support one another’s interests, share their research and work, challenge ideas honestly and, just as importantly, eat a good dinner with a glass of wine.

Architecture needs such tables.

Cities need places where people can arrive with separate knowledge and leave carrying part of somebody else’s. Ideas need rooms in which they are allowed to remain unfinished, be questioned and gradually acquire form.

This is how Maisternia Connections was born.

It will be a semi-private club built around conversation, curiosity and mutual support. I do not want it to become another room in which people exchange business cards and immediately forget one another. I want it to feel like the dinner did, generous, intelligent, informal and alive.

Perhaps its first piece of furniture has already chosen itself.

This morning, after the eleven-minute alert ended, I returned to my tea and sat at the oak table.

My computer mouse remained obediently on the central panel. The cracked veneer waited patiently for restoration. Beyond the balcony doors, Kyiv continued with its Monday morning.

When I was a child, I rearranged furniture because I sensed that changing a room could change how life felt inside it.

I still believe that.

Only now, I am no longer moving furniture merely to find a better place to read beneath a window. I am trying to create a place where people, memories and ideas can meet, and where something meaningful might gradually take shape around an old table.

Thank you for returning to Maisternia.

If you would like to help me continue writing from Kyiv, researching its architecture and building this independent workshop and the community growing around it, please consider a paid subscription or donation.

Your support helps keep the work moving, even when the furniture, the city and occasionally the architect require rearranging.

For now, the tea is warm, the table is steady in all the places that matter, and Maisternia Connections has found somewhere to sit.

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If you would like to keep my spirits, and this workshop, alive, please consider a donation or a monthly subscription.

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It reminds me that someone beyond Ukraine wants me to breathe, sip a coffee and keep stitching letters into words, and words into stories that need to be told.

Keep the Workshop Alive

1

Friedrich Gustavovich Michelson, 1840 to 1908, was a Kyiv industrialist, first guild merchant and city council member. Among the capital’s wealthiest residents, he owned brick and glass factories alongside extensive properties containing homes, shops, offices, schools, hotels and public baths. His holdings became so substantial that they were described as a city within the city. His Neo-Renaissance complex of apartment buildings remains part of Kyiv’s architectural inheritance, although years of abandonment have left it dangerously vulnerable. Michelson’s Manor and Kyiv Post.

Complex of houses of Friedrich Michelson — Go 2 Kyiv

2

Khinkali are Georgian dumplings filled with seasoned meat, vegetables, mushrooms or cheese. They are traditionally eaten by hand, with the broth sipped before the dough is bitten.

3

Khachapuri is a traditional Georgian bread filled with cheese. Regional versions vary in shape and preparation, with some served with butter and an egg.