Cabinet with Drawer and Cupboard

Of all the furniture in a house, the bedside gets the least thought and the most use. It's the first thing your hand finds in the dark and the last surface you see at night, it holds the water glass, the phone, the spectacles, the book at page forty and in its drawer it holds whatever a person keeps closest, which is nobody's business but theirs. A bedside deserves to be made properly precisely because it's private furniture and this one is.

The build is plain and sound. A single drawer on a wooden pull, sized for the small essentials, sits above a panelled cupboard door with a brass drop pull and behind that door goes the bigger, less presentable stuff, the extra blanket, the medicine box, the bag of chargers.

The timber is dark and heavily figured, striped grain running across the drawer front and the door panel so the two surfaces read as one piece of wood, brought up to a deep red polish. The apron across the bottom is cut in a shallow arch between square legs, a small detail that lifts the cabinet visually off the floor and makes it read as furniture rather than a box.