Small Room Above the City

The apartment is on a high floor in central Bangkok and it is not large: one living room, one bedroom. White walls, a pale laminate floor, and glass from floor to ceiling opening onto the whole city. Everything that comes into this place arrives by lift and down a narrow corridor, one piece at a time. And the single living room has to do three jobs at once — work, meals, and sitting with the view.

Our work is in both rooms. The bedroom got a bed with a wide board headboard and a nightstand; the living room a bar table with two tall chairs, a trestle-legged work desk, and a bench at the glass. The headboard is made wider than the mattress, running past the bed on both sides until it fills that stretch of wall, so the bed does not float in the middle of an empty one. The desk's legs are set in from both ends of the top, which means a castor chair rolls in anywhere along it without having to dodge one.

No two of these pieces are the same size, and they are not even in the same room. What holds them together is that every one of them stands on slim legs, clear of the floor — the bed as much as the bench. Nothing sits flat on the ground, so the laminate runs on underneath all of it and a room this size still reads open. Every top is joined boards with the grain running one way. And because the legs are drawn to the same slimness throughout, things doing completely unrelated jobs — sleeping, working, sitting with the view — read as one set instead of as things bought one at a time.

A condo is not a shop. Everything is in sight all the time, and in sight from every side: the bar table has its back to the sofa, the bench is seen side-on from across the room. The face nobody would ever look at in a restaurant gets looked at here every day. One whole wall is glass, so the sun reaches the middle of the room every afternoon. And that desk is in real daily use — it takes more hours than a dining table in a whole house does.