Where the Shoes Go

The front of this house is one long empty stretch of wall: white paint, big dark floor tiles, and a slatted screen down one side that lets the sun and the plants outside come through. It is where everybody stops to take their shoes off, and where a visitor stands before they have seen anything else of the house.

What we made for that spot is a single run of shoe cabinets: five metres long, 1.5 metres high, thick reclaimed teak throughout. It stops below eye level, so the wall above stays open and the entrance is not boxed in. Inside, shallow shelves repeat closely along the whole length, set at spacings for shoes and shoe boxes rather than for storage in general. Nothing five metres long arrives as one box, so the run was finished as separate cabinets in the workshop and brought into line against the wall on site.

The real work in a run like this is the line. Several cabinets have to read as one piece five metres long, and they manage it by obeying the same rules without drifting: every top at one height so the upper edge runs dead straight the whole way, every door the same width with the same slim vertical finger pull at the same height, the grain standing upright on all of them, and every carcass on square legs of one height. The only thing admitting they are separate is a thin shadow at each joint.

A cabinet at the front door works harder than one inside the house. Dust and wind off the street reach it first, some of the shoes going in are still wet, and the doors get slid with one hand by somebody balancing on one foot. What is inside is not light either: shoes and boxes fill every shelf along all five metres, and that load sits on shallow shelves the whole way. This is a piece used every day by people who never look at it, right up until the day a door stops sliding easily.