Somewhere to Wait

A showroom lounge is a room for waiting, not for eating. One wall is a continuous run of glazing, the floor is plank-look vinyl, the ceiling is downlights end to end, and there is a drinks counter at the far end. Nobody sitting here knows how long they will be, and most of them are on their own.

Every piece of furniture in the room is ours and we made all of it — tables, low-backed chairs, stools, and the long table fixed to the wall under the glazing. That long table is the one piece with no allowance in it: it runs the full length of the window wall, joined section to section until it reaches the end. However wide the room is, that is exactly how long the table has to be, and being out by a little shows along the entire line.

The job covers two zones that look nothing alike. The main lounge is all squares — box frames, straight legs, square corners. The smaller zone behind the glass wall is three round tops set overlapping each other, with round stools on tapered legs. What keeps them one commission is neither the shape nor the size of the timber: it is the same reclaimed teak throughout, and the fact that every piece holds itself clear of the floor. You can see under all of it, so the room stays open even with that much furniture standing in it.

There is something you only notice in a room like this one. Everything around the furniture is a material imitating a different material — plank-look flooring, wood-look wall panel, melamine on the drinks cabinet, aluminium around the windows. The reclaimed teak is the only thing in the room that is what it appears to be, and the only thing that gets more real the closer you walk up to it.