Cabinets for a Collection

The house is wide and bright, tiled in white stone polished until it throws a second copy of everything back up off the floor. White walls, dark timber skirting, big windows under dusty pink curtains. Most of the rooms are still open and empty, but what was already in the house is anything but plain: carved animals, an old dark cabinet, a bench on curved legs, and sets of children's picture books.

Our work is every light-toned piece in these photographs, all of it reclaimed teak: the low sliding-door sideboards and the chest of drawers, the bed, the glazed bookcase, and the long dining table with the chairs around it. The carvings, the dark cabinet, the little bedside tables on curved legs and the carved bench were already in the house. The bookcase fills its bay, starting at the edge of the curtain and finishing in the corner, stopping right under the step in the ceiling above it, and the shelves inside are spaced tall enough for the big picture books to stand up rather than lie stacked.

These pieces live in different rooms and do different jobs, but every one of them was built to the same agreement: the fronts stay quiet and the tops stay empty. Every cabinet opens by sliding, nothing swings out, nothing projects past the face, and the top edges are rounded off until there is no sharp line left. More important, every top is one flat empty plane, with no raised lip and no shelf built above it, because what goes up there is the owner's wooden birds, turtles, frogs and figures. The cabinets act as plinths for the collection rather than competing with it, and the sweeter old pieces already in the house stay the loud ones.

In a house with a floor this reflective, nothing hides. Every leg arrives with its own reflection, and dust on a top shows before you are through the door. Because every top carries part of the collection, those pieces get lifted off and set back down each time somebody dusts, which means the surface that wears first here is not a door but a tabletop. The bookcase, meanwhile, is opened by the children themselves every day, so its sliding glass is pushed back and forth more often than anything else in the house.