Brick Inside Every Room

The house is built of brick and left that way — not plastered, not painted, the squeezed mortar struck back only as far as it had to be. In the kitchen the brick runs floor to ceiling, and it carries on behind the shelving and above the wardrobes. The floors are large pale tiles and the ceilings flat white. These photographs catch the kitchen before the ceiling was closed, with the steel furring, the blue water pipe and the yellow conduit all still in the open. A long letterbox window is cut through the brick on the far side, and past the sliding doors there is a covered terrace with a fan.

Ours is the reclaimed teak. In the kitchen: a full-height unit framed around the oven, a run of wall cabinets the length of the room, base cabinets turning the corner, and one more cabinet hung above the long window. Beyond it, two wardrobe walls, a long chest of drawers and an open shelving unit. The counters, the round table and the chairs were not part of this commission. Both runs were set out around what was already fixed to the wall: the wall cabinets carry a recessed bay for the extractor, so its face lands level with the doors either side, and the cabinet above the window was made to the width of the opening exactly, finishing at the brick reveal at both ends.

Everything follows the same rules. Flat fronts, no moulding, and not one metal handle in the house — the wardrobes open on the vertical slot between two doors, the drawers on the gap between one row and the next. One batch of reclaimed teak served the whole house, so the colour carries from the kitchen through to the bedroom corridor without a break, and the figure was lined up between neighbouring fronts so a run reads as a single face. The one piece that breaks the rule is the open shelving unit. It has no doors at all, so its compartments are divided unevenly across the whole frame, and it becomes the thing the eye stops on.

Brick, tile and glass take no mark and give nothing back. The reclaimed teak is the only thing in the house that will change with use. Every front opens by laying a finger in a slot cut into the wood, so the edges are the part that gets handled and they are where the colour will come up first. There is no screw and no plate anywhere on a front, which means the way a door opens on the last day is the way it opened on the first. In the kitchen the fronts stand less than a metre from the hob and live with steam and cooking oil, and the bare brick behind the counter takes whatever the counter throws at it.