Restaurant on Patterned Tile

BAANBUAY is a restaurant that cooks everything in-house. The room is a single glazed pavilion: black steel frames divided into small panes on nearly every side, an open roof structure, and woven pendant lamps hung in a row. The floor is old patterned tile, many different patterns laid in a checkerboard from wall to wall — the room already has a pattern of its own. Nothing in it is fixed down: no booths, no built-in benches, so everything standing on that floor has to be liftable.

What we made for this room is every piece of loose furniture in it, all in reclaimed teak — round tables, square tables for two and for four, long benches, round-top stools, low-backed chairs, armchairs with wide flat arms, and a bar-height table with tall stools. The wooden door, its frame and the timber awning outside were already here. None of our seats has a tall back, so the stools and benches push all the way under the tops, and the narrow bar-height table fits along the strip of wall where a dining table would block the way past. The walkway stays open from the door through to the back of the room.

There is a lot of different furniture in this room and it still reads as one set. What binds it is one square tapered section of timber repeated through every leg, from the smallest stool to the round tables; a lower rail across the legs of every chair, at the same height on all of them and clear of the floor; and tops and seats of joined boards with the grain running the length of the piece. Stools, benches and chairs all sit at the same seat height, so any of them works at any table — six people turning up means pulling a bench alongside the chairs, and nothing at that table looks borrowed.

A restaurant asks more of wood than a café does. The same table is used several times over in a day, hot plates and glasses land on the tops constantly, chairs are dragged across hard tile every time someone stands, and the stools are carried around all day because the tables get re-laid for whatever size party walks in. With glass on nearly every side, the sun crosses those tops for most of the day. Furniture like this is not judged on installation day; it is judged years later, still in use.