Pantry the Size of a Room

This is the room behind the room. The ceiling is left open with its conduit and track lights on show, the floor is speckled terrazzo tile, the walls are bare white, and an old carved timber door sits in the middle of the inner wall. Through the opening, the next room is waiting with its chairs stacked and its glass-topped tables pushed together.

The drawings came from the owners and their interior designer. What is ours is the reclaimed teak: every cabinet in these photographs, built in the workshop and installed on site by our own crew. The run travels the length of the wall and gets past the existing door by carrying the wall units over the head of it, with tall cabinets landing on either side, so a wall with a door in the middle of it still stores things across its full width. The wine cabinet the house had already bought was given a teak enclosure made to the size of the machine, with glazed cabinets stacked above it to bring it level with the units beside it.

The pieces are spread across several rooms and no two are the same size, yet they all use one grammar: glass along the top, a band of drawers through the middle, solid doors below. The same order runs through the six-door cabinet in the big room, the four-door cabinet in the small one, and the free-standing sideboard on the timber floor in another. Every box stands on the same short square legs at the same height, so a broom passes under all of it, and every door and drawer, glazed or solid, is opened by the same black steel bar. Things sitting in different rooms still count as one commission.

A back room like this is used in bursts. Quiet on an ordinary day; on a day when the whole house eats together, things move in and out of it for hours. Glass doors are opened by hands that have just held something wet, and fingerprints show at once because the inside of the cabinet is visible the whole time. The steel pulls are gripped in the same spot more than anything else in the room, and they are the first thing to tell you whether a door was hung straight. Inside the glazed cabinets there is nowhere to hide either: a shelf slightly off level reads from across the room.