Curves in a Square House

The house was handed over with all the hard things already in place: large polished tiles running right through, beige walls, dark wooden blinds at every window, black-framed glass doors, an air conditioner high on the wall of each room. The living room and the dining room sit next to each other with no wall between them, so from either one you are looking into the other. And almost everything in the two of them is hard and reflective — tile, glass, black steel frames, a grey fabric sofa — and drawn in straight lines.

Two sets of wooden furniture in this house are ours: the dining table with its four armchairs, and the low tables in front of the sofa. The low tables were not made as one large piece. They are two, at different sizes and different heights, that slide over one another. The gap between the sofa and the television wall is just wide enough to walk through, so on an ordinary day they sit overlapped and leave the route clear, and when there are guests they pull apart into two full surfaces — without anybody having to find somewhere to store a spare table.

The two sets look nothing like each other. The dining set is square and straight; the low tables are teardrops without a single corner. Put in the same house, they still read as one body of work. First, one tone of reclaimed teak across both rooms. Second, what is on the tops: every top is joined boards, and on the low table the boards are matched so the grain opens out evenly on either side of the centre line — far harder to pull off on a top whose edge is curving differently at every point than on a rectangle. Third, the curves themselves. The rest of the house is straight lines: the run of the tile, the black door frames, the edge of the cabinetry. So every curve in the place is on something of ours — the chair backs bent to take a spine, and the low tables with the corners taken off altogether.

With the living and dining rooms as one space, everything is working at once all day. The four chairs are pulled out and pushed back over polished tile several times a day, with no rug anywhere to soften it. The low tables take heavy things and feet by turns all evening. Sunlight through the blinds crosses the tops in stripes from morning to dusk. And the air conditioning, on for most of the day, keeps these rooms drier than the air outside all year round. Wood that is going to live in a house like this has to have settled long before it was ever made into furniture.