Idan Gilony’s cocktail table
A serpentine table, citrus-toned drinks and a room made for celebration. For a charity gala in South Africa, the service became the architecture.
The table does not stop. It curves through the room in a long S, dressed in white cloth gathered into folds, and every metre of it carries glasses: coupes and martini glasses of a pale amber drink, each with its slice of citrus, more slices scattered on the cloth between them.
It was designed by Idan Gilony for a gala held by Yad Aharon & Michael, a South African organisation that, according to the SA Jewish Report, provides food assistance to 750 families. An evening raising money to put food on other people’s tables begins, here, with a drink handed across one.
Seen from above, the table reads as a single line drawn across a chequered floor. At the level of the guest it is something else: a counter you can follow from one end of the room to the other, taking a glass as you go, never quite reaching the end of the drinks.
Gilony is a Berlin-based creative director and designer. He studied fashion design and ran his own label before leaving fashion entirely in 2025, as he told FAD Magazine this summer. His work since has moved between food, installation and hospitality: a cocktail reception for BMW at the Cannes Film Festival, Easter snacks for WMF, and Garden of T at Milan Design Week, all in 2026.
The same interview lists hotel and set-design work from 2025, at the Edition Hotel on Lake Como and for a collection drop by CORE Objects, and a fragrance collection for his own label, UY Studio, shown at Alcova in April 2026. Visual Atelier 8, profiling him last year, named the Guggenheim Museum, Staatsballett Berlin, Berghain and the Museum of Design Zürich among his collaborators, and described a practice built on the dramaturgy of a space and the way the senses move through it.
“You can eat pasta from a glass, or drink from a fork.”
Idan Gilony, to FAD Magazine, 2026
The serpentine table works on that idea. Service is usually meant to be invisible. Here it is the shape of the room: the drinks repeated, shared, and impossible to walk past.
