Five gallon buckets turned upside down.
You could "wallpaper" them with contact paper.
Or delicatessens throw away many white, 4-gallon buckets that are more graceful than most 5-gallon buckets. If you soak off the labels (and/or use Goo Gone), you have a clean white truncated cone that isn't TOO ugly.
Or stack two columns of cinder blocks to get the right height, then lay a very sturdy board between them, like college-stricken-poverty-students did for bookshelves.