Wall You Can See Through

The rooms in this house are not large. White gloss tile runs through all of them, the walls are white, and a sliding glass door opens onto a narrow front yard where a tree grows up against the fence. Light comes in off that yard, hits the floor and brightens the whole room. And between the sitting corner and the room next to it there is no wall at all — you simply walk out of one and into the other.

Three pieces of wooden furniture here are ours: the divider, the sliding-door sideboard, and a round table with two armchairs. The divider does the hardest work, because it was set down where a wall would have gone — but it is only solid for its bottom half. From the top of the drawers upward it is vertical slats with gaps left between them. Everything untidy, in the drawers and behind the doors, is shut away out of sight, while daylight from the far room's window still comes through the slats into the sitting corner, and whoever is sitting on this side can still see that somebody is on the other.

The three do completely unrelated jobs. One is low and runs along a wall, one is full height and stands in the middle of the house, the last is small enough for two people. They still read as one body of work: the same tone of reclaimed teak, plain fronts, no mouldings and no pattern, and every piece that can be lifted standing on the same slim splayed legs — sideboard, round table and chairs alike. Only the divider goes all the way down to the floor, because it is doing the job of a wall and not the job of furniture. And standing in the sitting corner, looking through the slats, you see the table and the chairs on the other side. Two corners of the house at completely different scales, caught in one view.

The divider gets used in a way ordinary furniture never is, because it sits on the route between the two ends of the house. People pass it dozens of times a day, and from both sides. Its drawers turn into where the household puts things down. The sideboard doors are slid open every day. The round table is in real use every morning. The gloss tile means the chairs are dragged over something hard every time, with no rug anywhere to take the edge off it. And there is a cat in this house, which means every wooden surface at cat height is getting a second kind of use as well.