All the Storage on One Wall

The house had only just been moved into. The fridge was already in, with a child's chalkboard propped beside it; everything else was still bare. Plain white walls, long plank-look floor tile, and in the left corner a timber door with its frame stained a red-brown. The room runs on into the kitchen behind it, so it is the dining room and the pantry at the same time — and one long wall of it was completely empty.

We made four things for this room, all in reclaimed teak: the low run of cupboards standing on the floor, the shelf unit hung on the wall above it, the dining table with its bench, and the curved-back armchairs. The timber door and its red-brown frame belong to the house — the same material, plainly a different tone. The low run fills its wall exactly: it begins where the door frame ends and finishes at the far corner, closed off with a return panel that turns the corner properly rather than the cabinet simply stopping against the wall.

This wall is divided into two bands. The lower one is entirely shut — solid doors and flat drawer fronts, with nothing on show. The upper one is mostly open, wide bays of unequal width with a couple of closed doors among them. Between the two, a strip of white wall is left clear, and the run of power outlets sits in it with nothing covering them. What makes everything in the room read as one set is a single piece of grammar repeated at every size: a board standing on edge carrying a board lying flat. It is in the dividers of the hung unit, in the end panels of the low run, and in the dining table, whose legs are two upright slabs holding up the top; the bench is the same idea made small. Only the chairs curve — and they are the one thing in the room a person actually sits down into.

Open shelving is a promise you have to keep. Whatever goes up into those bays is on view every day with no door in front of it, and whatever you would rather not look at goes into the closed cupboards below. So this wall does not only hold things, it sorts them into what can be shown and what cannot. A house that has just been moved into fills up every year, and the lower run is the half that absorbs whatever keeps arriving, while the top of it will become the whole household's temporary landing place all by itself: market bags, keys, whatever was bought today. Everything goes there first.