Cabinet for the Breaker Box

The house was finished before the joinery arrived. Plank floor, skirting, door frames and the ceiling boards over the terrace were all in already, all of them brown, with white plaster between. What was left waiting were the plain parts: a bedroom with one wall still clear, a pantry with a window and a breaker box fixed to the plaster beside it, and a recess left open in an outside wall.

Ours is the reclaimed teak built into those walls: the wardrobe wall in the bedroom with a narrow open column at each end, the pantry run with its fluted doors and drawers, the two shelves on the wall beside it, and outside, the louvred panel that slides across the recess. The floor, the skirting, the doors and their frames, the ceiling boards, the stone counter and the taps are another trade's work. The wardrobe was set out to fill its wall exactly, corner to window, with the two open columns taking the strips left over at either end. The tall unit in the pantry was built around the breaker box already fixed to the plaster, so the box is still fully reachable and all anyone sees is one more door in the run.

One batch of reclaimed teak went into all of it, so the colour holds from a bedroom drawer to a panel out on the terrace. Two rules do the rest. Every closed face is either a plain panel or the same vertical fluting, indoors and out, which makes the pantry doors and the sliding louvre the same idea at two scales. And every door and drawer opens on the same slim metal bar, stood upright on a tall door and laid flat on a drawer front. The open shelving is the one place the job lets go: boxed into narrow columns in the bedroom, two loose slabs on bare plaster in the pantry.

The three do different work. The wardrobe is opened and shut more times a day than anything else in the house, and its drawers carry the most weight. The pantry stands at a sink, so it lives with water along its top edge and it is the one run where the wood stops and stone takes over. The panel on the terrace is the one that is genuinely outside. It sits under a soffit, but it is on the weather side of the wall and it slides, which makes it the only piece here whose fit gets checked by the house itself, season after season.