Tables in the Mist

The outdoor seating at Oakland cafe x restaurants is not an open terrace. It is a rock garden planted thick with ferns — moss over the boulders, dozens of different leaves climbing the bank — with a misting system running through it, so fog drifts across the tables all day. The floor is bare concrete, wet enough that water stands in pools between the tables, and a raised timber walkway crosses the middle of it. Past the garden is an air-conditioned room with a terrazzo floor and a battened wood ceiling. One restaurant, two opposite climates.

Our wooden furniture is on both sides of that line: tables, chairs and benches out in the garden; tables and a service cabinet in the cool room. The garden tables were not all made to one size. The planting beds and the boulders cut the floor into pockets, no two of them the same, so the sizes run from a small four-seater for a tight gap at the foot of the rocks up to a long table for the widest opening in the middle of the garden. And wherever one of them stands, a chair can still be pulled out and sat in without anyone stepping back into a fern bed.

No two of these are the same size and they do not even live in the same air, yet all of them speak one language. Every leg is plain square stock, nothing turned, nothing carved. Every top is joined boards laid flat, without a single moulding. Every chair in the garden has the same slatted seat with gaps left between the boards. The garden itself is deliberately unruly, one species growing over another, so whatever is set down in it has to be plain and has to repeat itself — otherwise tables of that many different sizes turn into patio furniture collected from a dozen places. The same language carries indoors: the tables in the cool room are drawn from the same lines as the ones outside. Only the service cabinet is allowed any pattern at all, two woven rattan doors where the crockery is kept. So somebody walking out of the fog and into the cold room still knows it is the same restaurant.

This garden is not an ordinary outdoor terrace, because the misting heads run through most of opening hours. The damp is not an occasional thing that arrives with rain and dries off again; it is with every piece all day long. The concrete hardly ever goes fully dry. Chairs are dragged over that rough floor every time somebody stands up. Leaves and grit off the beds land on the tops daily. The cool room is the opposite extreme — dry, cold air for the whole of service, hot plates set down on the tops, a cloth wiped over every table every turn, and the cabinet doors opened more times in a shift than anybody counts. One set of furniture has to hold up in the fog and in the air conditioning both.