Pool Tables: A Must-Have For The 'Lower Level'

Pool table sales, however, are not entirely reflective of this decline in pool table use. Tables are still a fixture in the homes of many wealthy individuals, and nowhere is this more apparent than on the East End.

A “family” sized, non-professional table (4 by 8 feet) requires a large room (13 by 17 feet), and many homeowners, even if they have that space, will use it for something rightfully deemed more important. With the prevalence of finished basements, however, which Alan Schnurman of Saunders says should appropriately be called “lower levels,” many owners of new homes are faced with a new problem: a surplus of space. As a result, pool tables have become a common part of the spec-house amenities package, which has been standardized to include a home theater, gym, sauna and wine vault.

“In the summer, we send trucks out there as many as three or four times a week,” says Steve Roeder of Blatt Billiards, “and business has definitely picked up.” Blatt recently relocated from its original four-floor factory location in Greenwich Village to a showroom on 38th Street and a factory in New Jersey. In the past, Blatt has sold tables to Dustin Hoffman, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Tom Hanks and, just recently, former mayor Michael Bloomberg for his house in Southampton (they could not disclose details about that table).

The company has been in operation since 1923, selling handcrafted pool tables that can take six months to make and sell for anywhere between $20,000 and $150,000. They also sell semi-custom tables that cost from $7,000 to $10,000. For many second-home buyers, Blatt is likely the only billiard company they are familiar with. “There’s only one option,” said Mr. Schnurman.

Daniel Scotti recently designed and developed a spec house on Further Lane in East Hampton. “When staging a house, pool tables are great for photography to show the potential use of a room,” he said. In the basement of his Further Lane house, which he decorated in an Art Deco style, he included a 1940s “Anniversary Edition” Brunswick table that was salvaged and restored by the furniture dealer Wyeth and re-felted in navy. The house, which recently sold for just below $12 million (table included), was rented by Diane Keaton over Fourth of July weekend. Mr. Scotti confirms that she did, in fact, use the table.

Wyeth typically has a pool table in their showroom in Wainscott, but the furniture dealer declined to comment on where they source these tables or how they restore them.

Jim Howard, who designed and developed a house off Mecox Road in Water Mill, built a custom table of his own design for the lower level of the house. He purchased a cheap table through eBay, kept the slate and pockets, and threw the rest away. He then designed his own base, using quarter-sawn white oak finished with chemicals and bleach. “You don’t want to wear the same dress to a party,” Mr. Howard said of buying standard production tables. His house sold this summer for over the $11.95 million asking price. “It was entirely because of the table,” joked Gary DePersia, the Corcoran broker who had the listing.

The pool table has been a status symbol ever since the essential concept of billiards infiltrated Europe from the East after the Crusades. It began to take its recognizable form in France, when many members of the aristocracy decorated their parlor rooms with ornate tables. According to Victor Stein and Paul Rubino, authors of “The Billiards Encyclopedia,” Louis XIV brought two tables to Versailles as a response to his physician’s suggestion that he get more exercise.

More than 100 years later, Louis XVI played a game with Marie Antoinette on the eve of the French Revolution. The queen’s game apparently benefited from her personal cue, which was made from one piece of ivory carved from a single elephant tusk and tipped with solid gold.

The game was confined to the upper class until the late 17th century, when tables began appearing in the inns and public houses of towns throughout England and America. During the 1800s many improvements were made to the game that ushered it into its heyday of popularity in the early 1900s. It was throughout this period that it became associated with gambling and shady characters. The English philosopher Herbert Spencer is famously quoted as saying, “Proficiency in pool is a sign of an ill-spent youth.”

In 1825, President Adams installed a table in the White House for “exercise and amusement,” according to an article by Edwin Miles in the New England Quarterly. The table led directly to charges from the Jacksonians that Adams was “not only extravagant in the use of public funds and aristocratic in his personal tastes, but also that he encouraged the vice of gambling,” writes Miles.

A surprising number of well assimilated phrases can attribute their origins to the poolroom and a game that the public has never followed with the same attention as baseball, football or other sporting sources of colloquialisms, notes Robert Craven in “The Journal of American Speech.”

Take these two opposing attorneys discussing the jury’s verdict after the trial:

“That was a tough break there, Eddie.”

“You just played it safe, Junior.”

“I had to, the judge was calling all the shots.”

“Give me a break, you floated that claim and he just let it ride with the jury. I was snookered.”

“C’mon, Ed, my defense was spot on. I knew all the angles, I had you on the rail the whole time.”

“It was a fluke. I played my string out as far as it could go, the verdict just wasn’t there.”