Doors Set Into Bare Concrete

This kitchen was already in use; the renovation came afterwards. The counter is bare cast concrete and it was there before we were — a grey top carried on concrete piers, with the openings left between them. The floor is square terracotta tile, the wall behind the sink is patterned tile, and the counter is covered in what a kitchen actually holds: pots, a wok, bottles of seasoning, a gas cylinder. This is a kitchen that cooks every day, not one kept for show. The shape of the job was decided before we arrived, because the concrete had already set.

What we made here is the doors and the drawer fronts in reclaimed teak, with the drawer boxes and runners behind them. The concrete structure and top, the stainless pull-out dish rack and the stainless-framed opening on the right are not our work. Not one of the openings the concrete left is the same size as another: some are wide enough for a pair of doors, one is a narrow vertical slot that takes a single door, others are divided into three stacked drawers. Every front had to be measured off its own opening and built to that, one at a time, and each one sits back inside its bay with the same narrow shadow gap all the way round.

No two fronts in this kitchen are the same size, and the run still reads as one thing, because every front carries exactly one detail and it is the same detail: a slot cut into the timber along its own top edge. Tall or short, wide or narrow, the slot is always at the top. Look down the run and you see a single line stepping along it, over openings that agree about nothing else. Everything else is flat panel — no handle, no moulding, nothing standing out from the face — so the figure in each piece of wood becomes the only thing that differs, and the only thing in the kitchen there is to look at.

A Thai kitchen that really cooks is as hard on wood as being outdoors is. Oil spits, steam comes off the pots, wet hands and oily hands open the doors every day, and every time the floor is washed the water reaches the bottom of the cabinets. The fronts sit at knee height, so they get kicked, caught by the mop and knocked by pans. A pull cut into the door itself has an advantage there: nothing sticks out to catch a cloth or a hip in a narrow kitchen. And there is one more thing about a renovation like this — the concrete will outlast everything, and the wood is the layer that can be changed. If this kitchen wants a new face one day, only the fronts have to go; nothing has to be knocked down.