Once upon a time, from about the late ’70s to the mid ’90s, the cassette mixtape was a vital ingredient in the lives of music-obsessed teenagers and 20-somethings. Unlike today, where it takes minutes to make a Spotify playlist and tag all your friends (or potential romantic partners you are trying to impress with your amazing musical tastes) making a cassette mixtape took a lot of time and effort. It was a labor of love.

Back in the day, you had to go through all your physical copies of albums, be they on vinyl, cassette, or CD, and then put your skills as a bargain basement junior editor/DJ to work. If you did it right, though, the results could be magic. One mixtape I made of bizarre musical oddities I’d collected over the years circulated through my high school during junior year and made me cool for approximately five minutes. (And that was the last time I was ever “cool”).

Now, one Los Angeles-based company is hearkening back to the good old days of homemade mixtapes with a series of retro-inspired furniture. Thanks to the folks at website This Is Colossal, we’ve leared that a company called TAYBLES has created a highly detailed (and fully functional) coffee table that also acts as a nostalgic throwback to the time of homemade mixtapes. The three artists at TAYBLES have crafted each table from hardwood and sealed them with a clear epoxy, with every table also coming with a classic cassette label affixed to the top, and LED lights hidden in the center of the mixtape’s holes for a super cool effect.

You can buy your own custom mixtape table on the company’s Etsy shop 214Graffiti, and browse though even more designs on their website. You can check out a whole series of images of TAYBLES’ cassette tape coffee tables in our gallery below, including one inspired by a certain “Super Awesome Mixtape” from Guardians of the Galaxy. 

What do you think of these amazingly detailed homages to a bygone era? And what would you write on your mixtape coffee table label? Let us know in the comments below.

Speaking of returning to great eras in music, here’s Regina Spektor talking to Nerdist about her first new album in years…

Images: TAYBLES