Kitchen That Kept the Tile

This is an old house, and the kitchen still had nearly all of its original surfaces. The glazed cream wall tile of the kind laid decades ago is all still there, a full band of it. The pale stone-patterned floor tile is original too, as is the square-barred steel security door in the left corner. Wiring runs on the face of the wall, and the ceiling is high in the way houses of that period are. The old kitchen units had already been taken out, leaving an empty room and its own old skin waiting.

Ours is the whole reclaimed teak kitchen that went in where the old one had been: the wall cabinets, the base cabinets, the drawers, the open bays and the board that runs beneath the wall units the length of the room. The wall tile, the floor and the steel door belong to the house and were all kept. What shows most plainly that this was measured against the real room is the height the wall units hang at. Their undersides were set just above the topmost course of the old tile, so that band of original tile still runs unbroken behind the counter from end to end — nothing stripped out, nothing cut, and no hunting for matching tile to patch with, which in a house of this age is simply not to be had.

Every front in this kitchen is made the same way: a board worked with a frame around its edge and left flat in the middle, from the tallest wall door down to the smallest drawer face. Different sizes, one rule. The pulls are a single black bar used throughout. And the board running under the wall units for the whole length ties an upper row in which no two cabinets are the same width into one continuous band. The open bays left in the middle of that row therefore do not read as gaps where something is missing, but as a pause that was meant.

A kitchen is the room where everything is coated in cooking grease daily and nobody notices it happening. The cooker here is a freestanding one dropped into a gap left to its exact width rather than built into the joinery, so on the day it fails it can be pulled out and another slid in without a single piece of the woodwork being touched. The open bays are for whatever is reached for often enough that opening a door first would be a nuisance. And a solid timber front carrying years of that grease can still be sanded back and refinished, rather than being the sort of front that has to be replaced whole once its edge starts lifting. That is why a timber kitchen stays with a house about as long as the house does.