Black Grid, Warm Altar

Most of the walls in this house are bare polished render, with one side laid in exposed brick. The floor is pale plank, black-framed aluminium doors open towards the trees, and square downlights are set into the white ceiling at intervals. When the photographs were taken the room was still empty, with only a large framed painting propped against the brickwork, waiting. In the middle of the floor a block of that brick wall comes forward and ends in a corner — not the corner of the room, but a corner pushed out into the space people use.

Two things here are ours, both of them reclaimed teak. The first is the grid of shelving, finished black and built around that brick corner. The second is the stepped altar stand, left the colour the wood already was. The panel of upright timber slats across the room belongs to the house. The grid was not simply stood against the brickwork: the black frame runs along the arris of the corner and along the top of the brick to its very end, so the brick becomes one side of the shelving rather than a wall with shelving leaning on it. A fit like that comes only from measuring the real corner on site.

These two make no attempt to look alike. The grid is taken to black until you can hardly tell it is wood at all, while the altar keeps the colour of the timber over its whole body. Yet both are built on one logic: square openings stacked in tiers of unequal size. The grid runs wide bays and narrow ones alternating across a single face; the altar rises in steps of unequal height so that whatever stands in front cannot hide what stands behind. What the two genuinely share is that each decides what is to be seen first. One of them simply chooses to disappear so that what sits on it comes forward, and the other chooses to be the thing the eye lands on.

A black-finished shelf in a room of bare render and brick asks very little attention for itself; what gets set down on it comes forward instead, and the shadow lying deep in each opening separates one object from the next without anything having to divide them. The altar is the opposite kind of object entirely. It is the piece somebody stands in front of every day — things are set down, water is changed, dust is wiped away again and again. The surface of the lowest step and the edge of the base are where hands reach most often in the whole house, and the storage in the base is there so that what is needed regularly stays within a stoop, instead of being fetched from somewhere else each time.