From Kitchen to Altar

The house was still a building site when the woodwork went in. The marble and the tile were down and polished, the walls were painted, the black aluminium windows were in, and the white base units in the kitchen and the service room had already been fitted. Cable tails still hung out of the wall where the television would go, and the furniture that had arrived early was under builder's plastic. No two rooms were the same shape: a living room open across a whole wall, a kitchen in one long line, and a service nook at the back barely wide enough to turn around in.

Ours is the reclaimed teak. The display wall in the living room, the kitchen run, the wall units above the window, the bench along the glazing, the shaped shelves, the sideboard and the tiered altar platform. The stone tops, the white base units, the window frames, the entrance door with the push plate and the floors belong to other trades. The bench was cut to the glazing it sits under, so it runs the full length of the window and dies into the wall at both ends with no filler piece, and the counter in the service nook is the width the room actually gave, wall to wall.

The pieces stand in different rooms and were made to the same rules. One batch of reclaimed teak served all of them, so the colour carries from a kitchen drawer front to the altar platform in another room. Every front is a flat panel with no moulding, every timber top is left thick at the edge, and along a long run of drawers the grain carries on across the joints instead of restarting at each front. The one thing that changes is how a piece is opened: the kitchen carries brass, the wall units have a shape cut down into the door itself, and the built-in wall has nothing on its faces at all.

A house is used harder than a showroom, and each of these rooms uses the wood differently. The kitchen run takes water, heat and cooking oil, and it is the only warm material in a room otherwise made of stone and white board. The bench under the window sits in direct sun and carries people's weight all day. The altar platform is the piece someone attends to every morning, and the one looked at closest and from lowest down, which is why it carries the thickest edges in the house.