The Long Table with its glazing folded fully open onto the square. One long table laid and lit under a row of pendants inside, tables laid under the canopy outside, and the arch with its QUATTRO SQUARE plate to the left.

← the floor Courtyard house/shopfronts·if / 049

2. The Long Table

The dining room, with a front that folds away entirely and the kitchen working behind it.

The card

shopfronts 02 of 07

2. The Long Table

shopfronts 02 of 07idea_049

The notes

rendered

Green glazed tile stall riser, deep green painted timber, gold leaf on the fascia glass. Three bays at 3 m, and the whole front slides or folds so the room opens onto the square without a threshold.

Behind it, 36 m2 of dining room with the kitchen in the same band behind that, another 36 m2. The kitchen has no front of its own, which is deliberate: what the square sees is people eating, not people cooking. The two work as one suite through a wide opening rather than a door.

The cost of that decision shows up on the east elevation. The kitchen now occupies the outer 4 m of the ring, so the single outward window on that face serves the kitchen. The long table itself takes all its light from the square. On a December afternoon with nine metres of sky overhead, that is a real consideration and not a detail.

An opening front in this climate wants the threshold designing properly: a drained channel, a flush stone transition, and somewhere for the folded leaves to stack that does not eat a bay.

The plates

2 · lift any one out

Inside The Long Table. One long table laid down the length of the room under a line of pendants, a fire in the wall to the left, a leather sofa in the foreground, and the kitchen lit at the far end. — 02 · Inside The Long Table