Kitchen Where the Wall Opens

The house was still being finished when the work went in. Plastic was still on the oven, film still on the stone top, a box of fittings left standing on the counter. The kitchen is a narrow room with one window and a wall fan. The two bedrooms are painted different colours, one a deep sea green across the whole wall, the other a plain grey, and both already had their track lighting and ceiling fans.

Our work in this house is the woodwork: the kitchen cabinets along both walls, wall units, base units and the recess the fridge stands in, plus the beds and wardrobes in two bedrooms. The stone counter, the tile, the sink, the extractor and the window frames belong to the house. The wall units run up to the ceiling, leaving no ledge on top for dust to collect, except directly over the sink, where the run stops short and opens into a lit recess. Whoever stands there washing up is not ducking under a cabinet, and the light falls where their hands are.

The two bedrooms do not share a headboard. One is made of horizontal slats, the other of crossed timbers, so the rooms do not read as two copies of the same hotel room. What keeps the house reading as one commission is not a pattern but a method: the same tone of reclaimed teak everywhere, flat fronts with no metal pull standing out of them, every storage piece finishing at the ceiling whether it holds plates or clothes, and a bed in each room with drawers hidden in its base. Two rooms painted different colours still belong to one house.

Steam off the sink rises straight onto the doors every time somebody washes up, heat and oil from the stove settle on whatever front is nearest, and those doors are opened with wet hands dozens of times a day. The bedrooms wear differently: wardrobes opened morning and night, bed drawers pulled all the way out, mirrored doors touched in the same place every day. It all came from the same wood, and each room eats it in its own way.