Wall That Became a Desk

The house is new, standing in a coconut and banana orchard in Suphanburi. When the furniture arrived it was not quite finished: the front is black steel posts under a deep flat soffit over a dark timber deck, with bare earth and stacked materials still all around it. The rooms inside had been completed first — plain white walls, pale laminate floor, security grilles on the windows, surface conduit running down to white switch and socket plates. Rooms with absolutely nothing in them yet.

We made two things for this house, both in reclaimed teak — one long cabinet run and a wardrobe for a bedroom. The dark timber deck and the counter in the open kitchen belong to the house. The run fills its wall exactly: it starts in the corner at one end and finishes at the edge of the curtain at the other, and the top carries on as one unbroken plane from the doors, past a bank of five drawers, and out past them as a desk with clear knee space underneath. That wall got both its storage and its workplace out of a single object.

The two pieces are in different rooms doing different jobs, and they are made the same way. Both are boxes rather than frames — not a leg to be seen on either. The top does not stop at the end of the case; it folds down and becomes the end panel, one continuous plane with the grain running round the corner without a break. Both stand on a base set back from the front by the same amount, so the same shadow line runs along the floor in both rooms. And the fronts are unbroken flat panels with nothing sticking out of them: doors and drawers open on a slot cut into the timber itself. A long run in one room and a wardrobe in another read as one object made at two sizes.

Something this size is a one-time decision, and the delivery photographs are why. Each case came wrapped whole, off the back of a pickup, onto a wheeled dolly, and took three or four people to push it into the house; the only work on site was lifting the pieces together into line, not building them up out of parts. The length, the height and the route it had to take through the door all had to be settled before it left the workshop. It also looks built in and is not — nothing is fixed to a wall, so it can leave the way it came. What will wear first is the doors and the drawers: in a room this bare they are among the few things opened and closed every single day.