Milieu’s tables make game night gorgeous!
Recreation rooms have been upgraded thanks to Buckhead-based game table company Milieu. “We’re reinventing the conversation around the game room,” says Lizz McKay, who co-founded the company with her husband, Chris. “In the past, it’s been very rudimentary, even in a retail store. There’s no customization and no client experience.”
The two inherited Venture Games, a game table company offering standard styles, from Chris’ father who purchased assets of a previous company that was almost 100 years old. The McKays both have been in the industry for decades, and Lizz has an interior design degree. With their backgrounds, they knew they could create something better than what was available for homeowners seeking a custom game table experience.
Milieu was founded in 2003, and the ADAC showroom opened last year. Here, she explains the process.
What’s the process for creating a custom game table from scratch?
While Venture Games are batchmade, Milieu are bench-made, one at a time. Chris works from beginning to end on a table, so it’s more like a piece of art. A batch-made game table takes about three days, but a bench-made table takes about two to three weeks to produce. The entire process can take up to 20 weeks.
What kinds of game tables does Milieu produce?
We can make tables for billiards, shuffleboard, air hockey, bumper pool and poker, to name a few. We customize everything for each client, so each table is special. For a benchmade piece, every aspect of the table can be customized; wood, color, size, and felt can be custom-made in any color. We offer metal details in brass or silver and can custom coat in many other accent colors. We also offer fully custom options. Our most popular are billiards and shuffleboard.
What makes Milieu different?
People often don’t think about a game space until after the home has been fully constructed. We educate designers and clients on starting the process earlier. We’ve worked with recognizable architects and designers, such as Bobby Berk and Robert Brown, and had the conversation on the front end. We want to help with how the room feels and operates.
We think about things they might not think about, such as whether the space is too big. That’s harder to do because you have to break up the space and make it comfortable and intimate for people to use it.
Where do you get your inspiration for your designs?
Like designers, we use travel, history, architecture and more for our inspiration. For example, we have a table called the Gigi. It has a beautiful hand-turned, bobbin-style leg. It’s based on a Louis XIII leg. We took that inspiration and modernized it so it doesn’t feel heavy. We have archives that go back to 1928. There are lots of pictures, too. We even have the original patent paperwork for the climatic adjuster on the bottom of a shuffleboard table.
What’s one of the most challenging installs you’ve done?
To get our client’s table into a home in Nantucket, we had to re-engineer the product so it could be reassembled in the space. We built it in four pieces with hidden hardware. When we put it together, it was seamless, and you’d have no idea unless you watched the process.
PHOTO: Joann Vitelli
