Downstairs by the Pool

The lower floor of a condo by the sea was stripped and redone from end to end. The ceiling is bare beams painted white with the conduit run openly across them, the walls are freshly white, the wood floor was laid before the woodwork arrived, and one black-framed window opening sits in the middle of a long wall. The room itself is long and narrow, so everything had to run along the two side walls and leave a single walkway down the centre.

Ours is every piece of furniture on this floor — the built-in kitchen run, the cabinet floating above the door, the wardrobe with a desk carried out of its own side, the long wall-hung shelf, and the sideboard and chest of drawers in the bedroom. The wood floor, the door frames and the worktops are someone else's. The clearest sign the set was made for this room is the cabinet above the door: one end is cut back on an angle to clear a wall return, and the whole thing sits in the narrow strip left between the head of the door and the beam with the conduit crossing it.

Some of the pieces are fixed to the wall and some can be carried out, but they all speak the same language. The corners of the tall cabinet and of the sideboard are softened by the same radius, every pull is a dark groove let into the front, and not one piece uses a metal handle. Every top is jointed teak with its full thickness left showing at the edge. Nothing sits flat on the floor either: the loose pieces are lifted on round tapered legs, the desk and the long shelf are lifted by the wall itself. Walk in and it is hard to say which pieces are built in and which could leave the room.

A room by the sea is not a room in town — the air is saltier and wetter, and this is the kind of home that tends to be shut up for stretches between stays, then cooled hard again the day someone arrives. Humidity here swings in cycles a lived-in house never sees. Reclaimed teak has already done its shrinking long before it was worked, so a door that closed properly on installation day still closes properly after the place has stood shut for a month. And the whole floor will deepen in colour together, because every piece started counting on the same day.