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Lady Clare Ming Polo Continental Large Placemats
£89.50
Set of four large Continental size Ming Polo placemats by Lady Clare with a black border and hand painted, gold edging.
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Large Placemats UK
Extra large or Continental sized UK tablemats. Usually supplied in sets of 4, these are the larger sized Jason and Pimpernel tablemats. These big cork backed mats can also be used to accompany your standard or regular set of placemats.
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Lady Clare Hunting Scenes Large Melamine Placemats
£69.50
Set of four large Continental size Hunting Scenes placemats by Lady Clare with a dark red border and hard melamine surface.
Large placemats found in the UK
Practical choice of large placemats
Historically the large size placemat sets are used throughout mainland Europe and North America, particularly the USA, as the preferred size. Typically measuring around 16” by 12”, about 40cm by 30cm and the idea is that the larger size accommodates not only the dinner plate and your cutlery, but also your drinks glass.
With everything fitting nicely on one handy sized tablemat you can avoid the necessity of having to use both drinks coasters and a tablecloth – as the knife and fork will rest on the placemat rather than the actual table.
This is particularly useful if you have a nice and attractive dining table which you want to display to your dinner guests. You can avoid covering it up completely with a tablecloth and use the large placemats to protect the tables surface in the key areas of plates, glasses and cutlery while showing off your table in the areas between these cork placemats.
For some reason this large placemat format has not gained much traction in the UK where the much smaller 12”x9” size tablemats are demanded and with separately matching drinks coasters. However each year more and more of our UK customers are discovering that the rest of the world is not always wrong and that sometimes they may even have some useful and practical ideas. One of which is the idea of using large placemats to protect your dining table and keep the stains and scuffs from damaging the furniture.
Extra large placemats
Everything is relative and finding extra large placemats in the UK is not easy, with the corkbacked range from Jason at 43cm x 29cm amongst the largest currently available. In reality much large than that would start to become excessive, particularly for day-to-day dining and if you were arranging a four course meal then that would be a lot of cutlery to fit onto even the largest of placemats.
So rather than extra large place mats, the typical size of a set of Pimpernel large placemats at around 40cm x 30cm is going to be the best placemats option for protecting your dining table and looking fantastic at the same time.
Useful table centres
With most large placemats, such as the Dancing Branches pattern, forming part of a design that includes matching standard size placemats and coasters, then a popular option is to use one or two of the large place mats as serving mats or table centres. These can hold for example either the condiments, a salad bowl or a vase of flowers.
Generally speaking pots and pans straight from the oven are going to be too hot for the surface of most corkbacked placemats. If they have cooled down or the food is served in a serving bowl then the option of using your large table placemats as attractive serving mats in the table centre is an option worth choosing.
Each large placemat works out more expensive than the standard size, such as the Classic Midnight blue placemats, due to the additional materials used, but when you calculate the fact you don’t need coasters, then there is not much in it.