Cabinets In Before the Paint

The house was new and at its finishing stage when this went in. Some of the plaster is still patched and unpainted; the ceiling is already done in an olive yellow with the downlights set into it; the floor is pale plank vinyl; the windows are black aluminium, looking out onto bare earth and the last of the building materials. The kitchen wraps a corner, with one window in the middle of the counter run.

All the joinery in this kitchen is ours, in reclaimed teak: base units, wall units, the full-height run beside the fridge, the worktop, which is timber the whole way along, and the panelling above the window and the door that carries on from the run. The aluminium windows, the oven, the hob, the fridge, and the floor, ceiling and walls are not our work. The upper band does not break at the window — the panel above it is set to the same face as the cabinet doors on either side, so the whole line reads as one plane crossing the opening. And the full-height run meets the ceiling with no filler strip over the top of it, which only works if the real height is measured on site point by point, because a new ceiling is never dead level the whole way across.

Run your eye along this room and it is hard to say where a cabinet door stops, where the wall panelling starts, and where the door through to the next room begins, because they are all the same face: flat boards of about the same width, the same shadow gap between them, standing in one plane. The only difference is what is behind — shelves behind some, solid wall behind others, another room behind one of them. The other thing held to throughout is grain direction. Everything upright, whether it is a cabinet door, the door itself or a wall panel, has the grain running up and down; the worktop runs the length of the counter. So the kitchen reads as one continuous piece of work rather than a number of cabinets set next to each other.

A timber worktop in a kitchen deserves a straight answer. It gets wet every day, it takes knives and hot pans, and the cut-outs for the sink and the hob are the hardest-worked spots in the whole house. What it has going for it is that the marks it picks up are not permanent the way marks in stone are: they can be sanded back and the surface brought up again, so a wood top collects a history rather than damage. And taking the full-height run right up to the ceiling means there is no ledge left on top of it — which in a Thai kitchen is exactly where the grease and the dust settle, and nobody wants to climb up and wipe it.