Wood Cut to Fit Old Walls

This old house was redone without covering up what was already there. The walls were plastered and left as they came, the floor is laid in small bricks, an old timber beam still shows in one wall, the tall doors and windows are painted blue-green, and the far wall was built up into a masonry counter with a sink, with openings left along it. The things standing in the room were the owner's already, the long table in the middle and the chairs around it included. The house had a face of its own well before any new wood arrived.

Our work here is not a single piece of furniture. It is the wood that fills openings someone else built: the doors in the masonry counter, the sliding-door cabinet above a stone ledge in the corner, the flush panel in the shower wall, and the window frames. The table, the chairs, the counter itself, the tile and the green-painted doors are not ours. The openings in that counter were built by hand and no two are exactly the same width, so every door was measured against its own opening — they were different widths before they were ever cut. In the shower, the panel drops into the tile courses so cleanly that its edges follow the joints without cutting through the middle of a single tile.

Everything here makes the same move: a flat plane of wood going into a wall or into a masonry opening. No legs, no visible carcass, no frame around the edge announcing furniture. The pulls are as small as a pull can be — a round hole cut into a bottom edge on one, two brass screw heads on another. In rooms that are otherwise plaster, stone and brick, the wood is the only warm surface there is. And because every piece repeats that one move, the wood at the counter and the wood in the shower read as the same hand, even in different rooms doing different jobs.

An old house finished in plaster and stone lets humidity travel right through it, and this set went into the wettest places it has. The doors sit beside a sink, the panel lives in a shower that takes steam every day, and the window frames take the sun and the rain from outside. Reclaimed teak has already done its shrinking long before it was worked, which is why it can be put in places like these. In time its colour will move toward the old beam that was in this wall before any of it arrived.