Down to the Doors

The house had only just been built. Plain white walls, a cove of hidden light running along the edge of the ceiling, timber flooring down. When we came in the work was not quite finished: every floor in the house was still covered over with cardboard and blue sheeting. The room in the middle is long and was still empty, and standing in the middle of it, touching no wall at all, is a square white column. That column was never going anywhere.

All the reclaimed teak in this house is ours: the room divider that runs on into the slatted screen, the kitchen fronts with their reeded-glass wall cabinets, the beds, the bedside tables, the wardrobes, and every door in the house together with its frames and the skirting. The terrazzo counters in the kitchen are the mason's work, and the flooring and tiling belong to the house. What shows most clearly that this was measured on site is that white column. The divider does not step around it: the column was brought inside the cabinet, with the shelves running up to it and continuing on the far side at the same level, so it ends up part of the joinery instead of an obstruction in the middle of the room.

Two things tie the whole house together. The first is a flat face with the grain running upright, used everywhere, with no bead or moulding worked into a single front, so that a door is plainly a relative of a kitchen cupboard and of the panels in the divider. The second is reeded glass, which turns up again and again wherever light has to pass but sight must not: in the wall cabinet over the counter, in the upper and lower panels of the room doors, in the sliding door, and in the narrow lights either side of the front entrance. And because the frames and the skirting came out of the same timber as the doors, there is nowhere in this house where one batch of wood meets another and the colour fails to agree.

A door is the thing in a house that is handled most and noticed least. Everyone living there pushes one dozens of times a day for as long as the house stands, and the edge of the leaf at hand height is always the first place to show it. That is the argument for a door being made of the same solid timber as everything else rather than being whatever was cheapest to buy in. The reeded panel at the top of each leaf lets a corridor with no window of its own borrow light from the room behind without the door having to be left open, and the sliding door, hung off its track, gives up none of the floor a swinging leaf would sweep. In a narrow passage that is a difference felt every day.