Dining Room Without Walls

The courtyard in the middle of this house has a roof but no walls. A steel frame runs from the house across to a tall corrugated metal wall on the other side, sheeted in translucent panels, so daylight reaches the floor all day without a lamp being switched on. The floor is a field of small tiles that gives way to plank flooring used as the walkway. One side is open onto the land next door, with no glass and no door, and wind and rain reach the table directly.

Three wooden pieces in this house are ours: the dining table and the long bench in the courtyard, and the washbasin stand in the bathroom. The dining table ends inside the tiled field of the courtyard, without running out onto the plank walkway, so anyone coming into the house passes behind the chairs without having to squeeze past it. The bench stands in for chairs along one long side and pushes back under the edge of the top when it is not in use. And the washbasin top carries on past the basin at one end, so there is somewhere to actually set things down beside it rather than a narrow rim around the bowl.

The three are in different places doing different jobs, one of them out in the sun and the wind and another in a bathroom, and all three are the same idea: a joined-board top standing on legs, open underneath. Not one of them is a closed cabinet, not one of them sits flat on the ground, and you can see the floor beneath all three. So the bathroom did not get the fitted cupboard most bathrooms get. It got a table, the same as the courtyard did. One tone of reclaimed teak runs from the table you eat at outside through to the basin inside, and walking from one to the other still reads as a single house rather than two rooms furnished separately.

A courtyard with no walls is harder on furniture than a room indoors. Sun comes through the translucent roof all day, the air cools and dampens at night, rain blows in from the open side, and dust off the land next door settles on the top every day. This table never comes inside; it is out there all year round. The bathroom is a test of its own — water off the basin onto the top, steam every time somebody showers, a floor under the legs that is wet as a matter of course. Reclaimed teak lived with weather for decades before it was pulled out and made into something else. The hardest places for wood in this house are the places it was put.