Island in a Room of Cabinets

The kitchen of a newly built house — white plaster, large pale floor tiles, downlights set into the ceiling, and a sliding window in the middle of the long wall that fills the room with daylight. Two walls meet at a right angle, and the middle of the room was left open enough to walk all the way around. So the room needed two things at once: a counter run following the walls, and an island that could stand on its own in the centre.

Every cabinet in this room is ours, and so is the wood on the walls — the base run along both walls, the wall cabinets carried up to the ceiling, the tall unit with open shelves in the corner, and the panelling that closes the walls full height until almost no white is left. What shows the set was built from measurements of this room is the window: the counter passes beneath it and stops clear of the sliding sash, so the window still opens as fully as it did before there were cabinets. The island sits far enough off the counter run for two people to pass without either of them turning sideways.

What makes so many separate cabinets read as one set is the fronts. The grain runs vertically on every door, the faces are flat with no handles standing out — a groove for the fingers instead — so the surface carries on unbroken from the base cabinets up to the wall units. The open shelves in the tall unit are lined in the same wood, backs and edges alike, and the sides of the island are single boards taken all the way down to the floor with no legs showing. Walk in and you see one wall of wood with cabinets inside it, rather than a row of kitchen units set side by side.

The island takes the hardest use in the room. It stands in the walkway, it can be knocked from all four sides, someone leans on its edge every day, and it carries weight constantly. Panelling that runs the length of a wall has the opposite problem: it can hide nothing. A board that moves even slightly over a run that long shows up at once as an uneven gap. Reclaimed teak has been through enough seasons to stop shrinking long before it was worked, so it lives with the rising and falling humidity of a kitchen without pulling away from itself — and as the colour deepens year by year, the whole room deepens together instead of one door darkening on its own.