Assembled in the Living Room

The house was already lived in before any of this arrived. The living room runs into the kitchen corner, where a black glass cabinet and the fridge were standing already, and the floor changes halfway across the room, dark parquet inside and pale laminate out. On the far side a balcony door carries a curtain to the floor. Only one wall was genuinely empty, and it was empty all the way to the ceiling.

Our work in this house is that one wall of reclaimed teak cabinets: sliding glass doors along the top, the panel behind the television, the cabinet the TV stands on, and the glazed column stacked up beside the curtain. The black glass cabinet, the fridge and the floors belong to the house. The wall runs the full height and stops against the ceiling, one end finishing on the line of the existing fridge recess and the other where the curtain begins. Every door slides, so nothing swings out into the walkway in front of it. And because the whole thing could never come through a doorway in one piece, it left the workshop as parts and was put together into a wall in the living room itself.

No two cabinets in this wall are the same size, and the wall still reads as one object, because the rules never change: glass along the top, solid below, the same width of teak framing around every pane. Every face is flat, and the pulls are slim vertical strips set into the face, so nothing stands out to catch a sleeve. The panel behind the television is glued-up teak laid horizontally, running the same way as the doors around it, which keeps the open middle reading as part of the cabinet rather than a hole in it.

A television wall is looked at longer than anything else in a house. Somebody sits in front of it every evening, and the glass keeps whatever is inside on show, so dust and fingerprints land on sliding doors more visibly than anywhere else. For part of the day the sun from the balcony door reaches the fronts. And standing tight to the ceiling, this is not a thing to be dragged to another corner on a whim: the day the house needs it moved, it comes apart into the pieces it arrived as.