Counter Against Teal Tile

The shop had only just opened. Outside the windows a blue builder's tarp is still up, with banana trees and a balcony rail behind it. Inside: white walls, a white boarded ceiling with the rafters showing, a polished grey concrete-look floor, and one band of green-blue glazed tile running the whole length of the service wall — the only colour in the entire room. The teak door, its frame and the window frames belong to the building, close as the tone is.

What we made for this shop is on both sides of the room. The customer side got the tables, the chairs, the benches, and a long counter table along the window with the tall chairs that belong to it. The working side got the whole timber-fronted bar counter and the cabinet hung on the wall above it. All of it reclaimed teak. The window counter is the length of the window and no longer — it begins where the wall ends and stops where the opening stops, without eating into the walkway — and the wall cabinet fills the run of wall between the two door frames exactly.

Not one piece in this room is the same colour as another. They run from pale honey to a brown so dark it is nearly black, standing together in one room, and it still reads as one set — because these are not different woods. It is reclaimed teak of different ages, so the colours are steps inside one family rather than colours arguing with each other. The other thing holding it together is that everything is built to the same shape: square section, right angles, flat panels, not one curve and not one turned part anywhere in the shop. The front of the counter is a flat panel in a frame; the doors of the wall cabinet are that same flat panel in a frame, shrunk down. What is fixed to the wall and what can be picked up and moved are speaking the same language.

The counter takes more punishment than every table in the room put together. Someone stands at it all day, knocking out a portafilter, setting down jugs, spilling water and milk and grounds in the same few places over and over, and its front edge is where customers lean and look at the wood from a hand's width away. The wall cabinet has a hard position of its own: it hangs directly over the machine, so steam goes up into it with every cup made. And the tables no longer take only coffee cups — this shop serves food as well, so hot plates and sauce come down on them every day. Three pieces of one set, wearing out in three different ways.