Rokeby Street

A furniture maker who had outgrown a shed in Brunswick and wanted, for the first time, somewhere clients could visit. The difficulty was that the two halves of the business do not want the same room. A workshop wants to be loud, dusty and rearrangeable. A showroom wants to be none of those things.

We did not divide the space. There is one room, and a mezzanine of galvanised steel runs down the long side of it, so the showroom sits above the workshop and looks into it. Clients see the machines working while standing among the finished pieces, which was the argument for the whole layout: this maker's value is the making, and hiding it behind a wall would have been the expensive mistake. The acoustics are handled by wool felt baffles over the workshop half only — enough to take the edge off a thicknesser without deadening the room.

Almost nothing was added at floor level. The slab was already there and was ground and sealed rather than levelled, so the joints and two old machine bolt patterns are still legible. The birch ply display joinery is the only soft material in the room and every edge is left exposed, laminations showing, because a furniture maker's showroom should not pretend that sheet goods are solid timber.