Kitchen Built Twice

A kitchen in a newly built house — white plaster, pale tile, downlights set into the ceiling, and a black-framed window that fills the room with daylight through the day. Two long walls meet in a right angle, with a tall gap left at the far end for the fridge, so the woodwork had to run along both of them and carry the corner without a break.

Every cabinet in this room is ours: base units with their bank of drawers, wall cabinets running the length of the wall up to the ceiling line, and the glass-fronted tall unit on the corner. The whole set was built up complete in the workshop first — the entire kitchen standing there before it ever left — then taken apart, carried to the house and built again in the room itself. The openings for the oven and the microwave were cut to the owner's own appliances, so each one sits flush in its teak column with no gap left over.

What makes the cabinets read as one set is the detail repeated on every one of them. The grain runs vertically on every door. The handles are reclaimed teak like the doors rather than bought metal pulls set against the wood. The glazed doors are framed in the same timber, so the tall unit stays part of the run instead of a separate dresser, and the column housing the oven wears the same face as everything around it. From the smallest drawer to the cupboards at ceiling height, the room reads as one piece of work, not cabinets brought together afterwards.

A kitchen is the hardest-worked room in a house — heat off the hob, steam off the pots, wet hands, doors opened dozens of times a day, and drawers carrying a full load of pans and plates. Reclaimed teak has done its moving long ago, so it lives with the daily swing in humidity here without twisting, and the colour deepens with the years. A kitchen that has been used properly usually looks better than one just installed.