Every Seat Against the Glass

The café is a small freestanding building: white walls, a dark timber-plank floor, and wide windows on two sides opening onto a deck packed with plants. Light comes in from two directions all day. There is not much floor to work with — a counter takes one side, and the rest has to stay walkable from the door to the till.

What we made for this room is the seating along the glass: two bar-height tables, one long and one short, and the tall backed chairs that belong to them. The two tables are different lengths because the two runs of wall are — the long one goes along the wide window, the short one takes what is left between the window and the corner. Every seat ends up against the edge of the room, and the middle stays open to walk through.

There are two tones of wood in this room. What was already here — the counter, the shelving, the pale curved-seat stool against the wall — is light; our set is the darker brown, holding one dark line along the windows. What binds it together is one square section of timber repeated from chair leg to table leg, and a footrail at the same height on every chair, so from the side the whole row reads as a single line. Every top is joined boards with the grain running the length of the table, which is why two tables on different walls still read as one piece of work.

A bar-height chair wears differently from a dining chair. People step on the footrail to get up and down, so the same spot takes weight all day. And a bar top sits at the eye level of anyone standing — marks you would look past on a low table are in full view up here. With windows on two sides, the sun crosses those tops for most of the day. Seating like this asks more of the wood than it looks like it does.