Wardrobes End to End

A new house with nobody in it yet — bare white walls, pale wood-look flooring, grey curtains only just hung, a mattress still in its wrapper and a box left standing in the corner. The bedroom has one long uninterrupted side that runs from the door all the way to the corner. The dining and living rooms are glossy pale tile with nothing on them at all.

Ours in this house are the fitted wardrobes that fill the length of the bedroom, the bed whose headboard carries on past the mattress and becomes the bedside table, the dining table with its chairs, and the low table in front of the sofa. The room doors and the wood-look flooring came with the house. The wardrobe run was measured off the wall itself, starting at the door casing and finishing into the corner, and its top tier is pushed right up to the ceiling so no dust gap is left above it.

What ties the pieces together is a detail that repeats on all of them. Every door and drawer front is grooved with a rectangle set in from the edge. The black bar handles are the only metal that shows anywhere in the house. The loose pieces — the dining legs, the base of the low table, the bed platform — are thick square-edged board, with nothing turned or tapered among them, and every top is boards joined into a panel. Open a wardrobe and the shelves and sides are the same reclaimed teak as the front, not something cheaper once you are past the door.

A wardrobe is used every morning, opened and shut several times a day, with the weight of clothes on the rails and shelves the whole time. Isan swings between a dry season that pulls timber open and a wet one that pushes it back, inside the same year; wood that has not settled will move enough within a few seasons for doors to bind or stand proud. Reclaimed teak went through those cycles for decades before it became this cupboard. And because every piece here came out of the same wood, the whole house will darken at the same rate.