Eight Chairs Under a Roof

This is not a room. It is a paved terrace under a roof, between the house and the garden: the roof carried on steel posts, no wall at all on the garden side. The floor is dark patterned concrete block that turns black and mirror-bright every time it rains, and the planting comes right up to its edge — heliconia, elephant ear, ferns, pots lined along the kerb. Rain reaches the floor all the way around the table. Whatever stands here stands here all year; it does not get carried indoors when the wet season starts.

We made two things for this house — one long block-leg table and eight slat-back chairs, both in reclaimed teak. The small side table at the edge of the terrace and the wooden crate of plants standing on the top belong to the owners. The terrace is a long narrow strip between the house and the planting bed, so the table had to be a long narrow rectangle that leaves a path open along the garden side. And because the legs sit hard into the corners, with the face of the leg level with the end of the top, neither end of the table can be sat at: all eight seats have to run along the two long sides. The length of this table was set by the number of people, not by the size of the terrace.

There are only two kinds of piece here and they speak exactly the same language. Nothing in the set curves and nothing is turned; every member is a straight square section, and the only thing that changes between the table and a chair is how thick the stick is — a table leg is a chair leg several times over. The chair back is flat slats laid across, the same flat plane as the table top. So in a place where the background is nothing but leaves and bending stems, this set is the only straight line in the picture, and because it is all the same straight line, one table and eight chairs never come apart from each other.

Furniture that lives outside under a roof takes far more than furniture indoors does. Rain blows in from the side, the floor stays wet for hours, and through the rainy season the humidity barely drops for days at a time. Nobody dries an outdoor table after every shower, either — water standing on the top overnight is normal here. Wood that is going to survive in this spot has to take that moisture up and give it back without twisting; a joint that is perfectly happy in an air-conditioned room can work loose in a single wet season. And an outdoor table never gets a tablecloth over it. The top is the surface that gets looked at every day, with nothing covering a square inch of it.