First Things in the House

The house was brand new when the furniture went in. Polished grey tile reflecting each downlight back whole, plain painted walls with nothing hung on them yet — three sockets and a grey curtain — and a black-framed glass wall down one side. The dining area and the living area run together as one floor with nothing between them, so whatever gets set down in it becomes the divider.

What we made for this house is every piece of loose furniture in it, all in reclaimed teak — a long dining table with its bench, armchairs, a second table for two, a TV console with a coffee table, and a glass-doored display cabinet in another room. The plank floor and skirting in the cabinet room are the house's own work. The console tops out below the line of the wall sockets: pushed right back against the wall, all three sockets still sit clear above it, so nothing has to be dragged out to reach a plug.

These pieces do completely different jobs, from eating off to storing things in. What binds them is that no metal shows anywhere in the house — the console drawers and the cabinet doors open on a slot cut into the timber itself, not one metal handle among them — and that every edge is eased round, from the corners of the cases to the table tops to the arm rail of the chairs, bent round to carry the whole forearm. The dining table and the bench stand on the identical leg frame, and the bench seat is joined boards running the length of it, the same as the table top. The bench reads as the table in short form, not as seating found later to go with it.

A house that has just been moved into keeps filling up. Things arrive one at a time, rooms get re-laid every few years, and nobody knows today which wall that cabinet will be standing against in five years. This set is all loose — nothing fixed to a wall, nothing built in — so it moves as a set. The display cabinet in the corner of the plank-floored room would still belong beside the TV console, because every piece was made in the same language from the start. The drawers pulled every day and the glass doors that leave the contents on show are the two things that will say how well the work was done.