The Surreal Tableware Dalí Would Have Loved

A good table setting usually knows its place. Plates go here, cutlery there, a vase in the middle. The Bird Edit seems considerably less interested in following instructions. Each piece starts with a natural shell and pairs it with sculptural silver structures inspired by the legs and claws of birds and small animals. The result is a collection that sits somewhere between functional object, found treasure and small-scale sculpture.

It is also precisely the kind of collision that makes sense when you look at who is behind it.

Born and raised in Tel Aviv and now based in Lisbon, Omer Gilony has built a reputation for turning tables into elaborate visual worlds. Her work spans table setting, set design, floral design and food styling, with an aesthetic shaped by Dutch still-life painting, Baroque and Renaissance art, flea-market finds and what she calls “curated nostalgia”.

There is usually something slightly theatrical about her tables: antique silver, flowers, fruit, fabrics and food arranged with the precision of a still life, but with enough strangeness to keep things from becoming too polished. She has worked with fashion and luxury names including Dior and Chanel, and her tables have appeared in settings ranging from Vogue shoots to events in Berlin, Paris and Mexico.

The Bird Edit feels like a natural extension of that universe. Except this time, the strange little characters are built into the tableware itself.

The other half of the equation is Tavares 1922, a family-run Portuguese jewellery and goldsmithing house founded by Virgílio Aristides Tavares in Póvoa de Varzim in 1922. The business has remained at the same address for generations, and its history is closely tied to Portuguese goldsmithing and the craftsmanship of precious metals.

That heritage gives the collaboration its best contrast. Gilony brings the visual imagination and the slightly surreal sensibility; Tavares brings a century of working with metal. Rather than smoothing out those differences, The Bird Edit makes a point of keeping them visible.

The collection includes dishes, spoons and forks alongside vases and candle holders. Some pieces look almost as if a bird has wandered onto the table and decided to stay. Others feel more like objects you might find in a cabinet of curiosities than something you would casually reach for at dinner.

And that is what makes the collection work. It does not treat tableware as a background detail. It gives it a personality of its own, somewhere between nature, craft and surrealism.

Dalí would probably have approved.