A table set for eight should look composed before anyone sits down, and the way to get there is to put less on it. Everything that follows is about restraint, spacing and order.
Start with the cloth, or without one. A bare wooden table with the grain running the length of it is the quietest surface there is. If you do lay linen, let it fall 30 cm over each edge and press only the fold lines out, not the whole cloth. A cloth that is too perfect looks like a hotel.
Set the plates first, and set all of them before you set anything else. Eight Lino dinner plates, 28 cm, with 60 cm from the centre of one to the centre of the next. That spacing is more generous than most tables allow, and it is the single thing that makes a setting feel calm. If the table is short, seat six. The side plate, 21 cm, sits to the left and slightly above, so that its rim and the dinner plate's rim never touch.
The bowl goes on the plate only if the first course needs it. An Arco low bowl on a Lino plate is a deliberate pairing: the stoneware is a shade warmer than the porcelain, and the reactive glaze gives each bowl a slightly different face. Eight of them together look like a family rather than a set, which is the point.
Cutlery next, and here the rule is old and still right: work from the outside in, in the order the courses arrive. For three courses that is a small fork and knife outside, the table fork and knife inside, and the dessert spoon and fork above the plate, the spoon with its handle to the right and the fork with its handle to the left. Corda is forged steel with a little more weight at the handle than most, so it sits flat and does not rock. Leave 2 cm between the plate and the nearest piece. Line the handles up along an imaginary line 2 cm from the table edge, and they will read as one gesture down the length of the table.
Glasses go above the knife. Water first, closest to the hand, then wine to its right and slightly higher. A Vela water tumbler and a Vela red wine glass, two glasses only. A white wine glass can come out with the course that needs it. Three glasses at every place is what a restaurant does because it cannot know what you will order. You know.
Nothing is sold twice. Set one glass for what you are actually pouring.
Napkins go on the plate, folded once into a rectangle, not into a shape. Linen, washed until it is soft, in the same bone as the plate or a shade darker. If you want colour on the table, this is the one place for it, and it should be a single quiet colour, not a pattern.
Now stop. Look down the table from the end, at the height of a seated guest. What you should see is a row of eight identical stations with clear wood or cloth between them, and no object taller than a wine glass. Candles, if any, are low and few. Flowers, if any, are in one vessel at the centre and cut short enough to see over. The serving pieces are not on the table yet.
They arrive with the food, which is the last principle: the table is set for the guests, not for the meal. A Lino oval serving plate and a Vela carafe come out when there is something to put in them, and they go back to the kitchen when it is gone. A table that is never cleared of what it no longer needs starts to feel crowded by the second course, however sparely it began.
Clear in the same order you set: cutlery and plates from each course together, glasses last, cloth after everyone has left the table. The last thing on the table should be the thing that was there first.