Concrete Left as the Finish

The house was left as it came out of the formwork. Board marks and tie holes across every wall and ceiling, conduit run on the surface in plain sight, grey tile underfoot, and a single white door as the only painted thing in the room. Nothing was plastered and nothing was lined over. In the living room the concrete carries from the floor up to the beam and out to the glazing without a break.

Ours is the reclaimed teak: three platform beds across the two bedrooms, a wardrobe in each of them, and along the living room wall a set of shelves with two hung cabinets, one of them divided into vertical slots for records. The steel standards the shelves sit on, the tile, the doors, the lamps and the sofa were not part of this commission. That wall was set out around what was already fixed to it, so the group of switch plates in the middle lands in clear space between the shelf above and the cabinets either side, still within reach.

Everything was made to the same rules. One batch of reclaimed teak served all three rooms, so the colour carries from a headboard in a bedroom to a shelf in the living room. Every face is a flat panel with no moulding and not one handle standing off it: the wardrobes open on a slot cut into the edge of the door, the hung cabinets on the same slot along a drawer front. The headboards are the one place the rule bends. Each is cut wider than the bed it belongs to, so the panel becomes the piece and the platform under it drops out of sight.

Concrete does nothing to soften a room. It holds cold light, it carries sound, and it takes no mark. The reclaimed teak is the only thing in these three rooms that will change with use: a bed ledge stepped on every morning, a wardrobe door opened with the same three fingers, a shelf rearranged every time something new comes home. The living room wall will change fastest of all, because it is the one piece here built to be moved. The shelves and both cabinets hang off slotted uprights, so where they sit is a decision that gets made again.