Shelves Instead of Walls

This is an old house taken back and renovated throughout. The walls have all been painted white again, parquet upstairs, pale tile downstairs, and a black lighting track runs under the ceiling of almost every room. The middle of the house opens up through two storeys, with an original concrete beam and its yellow pipe still showing in one corner. Some of the windows look straight into the neighbouring building a few metres away, the way city houses do. There is not much floor in this house. There is height.

Ours is nearly all of the reclaimed teak fitted into it: the grid shelving and bookcases in every room, the built-in cupboards, the wardrobes, the whole kitchen with the laundry-room cabinets, and three loose pieces besides, being the long dining table, the TV console and the shelves in the bathroom. The parquet floor, the stair railing, every timber door including the louvred one and its frames, and the small curved-leg table standing beside the bookcase belong to the house. The clearest evidence that this was measured on site is the bookcase wall with a window in the middle of it. The shelving does not stop at the reveal; the grid surrounds the window on all four sides, and a deep board laid under the sill carries the line of the shelf straight across from one side to the other.

The whole house speaks one language, and it is a single thing: an open square cell of much the same size, repeated room after room. In one place it is a bookcase held against the wall. In another it stands free in the middle of the floor and becomes the divider that a wall would otherwise have been. Somewhere else it climbs the full two storeys of the void. At the kitchen it turns into a screen with frosted glass set into the openings. Everything that closes, meanwhile, uses the same flat front with the grain running upright, whether it is the kitchen, a wardrobe or the laundry cupboards, and the loose pieces, table and console, come out of the same timber. So they do not read as furniture carried in afterwards. They read as the rest of the house, merely the part that happens not to be fixed to a wall.

A house built mostly on open shelving is a house that lets its own belongings become the wall surface. Every book that goes up is looked at daily with no door in front of it, so the grid does not only hold what the household owns, it declares it. And because some of that shelving is doing a wall's work, light from a window in one room still comes through the openings into the next: the rooms are divided without being shut. What closes, then, has a job of its own. The kitchen, the laundry cupboards and the wardrobes are where the things that should not be in view every day go. The whole house is sorted along one line and one line only, which is open against closed, and in an old house where floor area is finite that is how everything found a place without another wall having to be built.