RS Folding Monochrome Ping Pong Table | Black

Most ping pong tables are embarrassing. Blue, plastic, built for a school hall. Which is why plenty of people with the room for one still don't have one.

There's a particular kind of host, though. The one who thought about where people would stand. Who owns the good glasses and uses them on a Tuesday. Who has never once bought the ugly version of anything, on the grounds that it was only for the garden. Who has noticed that after dinner there's an hour when everyone drifts — music is too obvious, nobody wants another drink, and the evening either finds something to do or quietly ends.

That hour is what this is for. Specified like garden furniture, built to regulation, left outside on purpose. Twenty-one colours. It folds and rolls, though not to be put away — it moves so the game can follow the evening.

It won't improve your backhand. It will give the drifting somewhere to go.

• Designer: Rafael Rodríguez
• Unfolded: 274 x 152.5 x 76 cm (108 x 60 x 30 in)
• Folded: 71 x 152.5 x 162.5 cm (28 x 60 x 64 in)
• Playing surface: Aluminium, micro-textured powder-coated polyester paint
• Structure and legs: Steel, cataphoretic coating and micro-textured powder-coated polyester paint
• Wood detail: FSC/PEFC-certified iroko
• Net: Coated polyester fabric
• Mobility: Folds vertically, all-terrain wheels
• Use: Indoor and outdoor
• Colours: 21, referenced in RAL and NCS
• Weight: 127 kg
• Packed: 168 x 77 x 184 cm, 170 kg
• Included: Net, 2 paddles, 6 balls, storage bag
• Assembly: Arrives assembled
• Made in: Olesa de Montserrat, Barcelona, Spain

RS Barcelona began in 1975 as a sheet metal workshop in Viladecans, opened by Rafael Rodríguez Sevillano, a mould maker. His two sons grew up in it. Years of bending steel to other people's drawings eventually produced something of their own: a football table built to leave the garage and come into the house.

The third generation is in the business now. In 2024 the whole operation moved into a purpose-built factory at Olesa de Montserrat, forty kilometres from Barcelona, where every piece is still made. Fifty years on, the metalwork is the part that hasn't changed.