Library at the Window

This is a small room in a house, its walls clad in wood-grain panelling right up to the ceiling and its floor cream tile printed with a small flower motif. One window opens onto a wall of green, a second opening is cut through the side wall, and a single patterned shade hangs from the ceiling on a rope. The room is wide enough for one person to walk through. The books coming into it are encyclopedias, dictionaries, atlases and heavy boxed sets that have to stand together in runs and cannot be split up.

We made five pieces for this room — two bookcases, one writing desk and two chairs, all in reclaimed teak. The panelling, the window frames and shutters and the small table beside the wall opening belonged to the house already. The desk is built so its top finishes level with the bottom edge of the window, and it runs exactly the length of the wall below that opening: sitting down to write, you look up into the whole window with no edge cutting across it.

What makes five different pieces read as one set is that every one of them is an open frame. The bookcases have no back, so you see the wall through them. The desk has no drawer and no panel closing in the space under the top. The chairs are open through the back and under the seat. What is left is one square section of timber at much the same size, repeated from the shelf posts to the chair legs. A small room with one wall already solid with books does not get any heavier than that. Both chairs carry the same curved back rail, so two of them at one small desk still read as a pair.

A library is the hardest room in a house for woodwork. Books are the heaviest thing per metre that ever goes onto a shelf, and once they are up they stay up — nobody takes a run of encyclopedias down for years, so the load sits in the same place the whole time, and a shelf that is going to sag will show it within a few years. The room is narrow, too. Anyone pulling a book off stands one pace from the shelf, so every joint here is read closer than furniture anywhere else in the house. This is the set that gets touched every day and never moved.