Casa Margeride, year on
Projects
We went back to the apartment where nothing structural moved, and looked at what a year of ordinary use had done to it.
We return at three months and again at a year. The three month visit is housekeeping. A door that has dropped, a shelf nobody uses, a lamp in the wrong place. The one year visit is the one worth writing down, because by then the family has stopped being careful and the apartment has started behaving like itself.
They moved back into Casa Margeride a year ago this month, with the bench in place and the last of the joinery still six months away. Nothing structural had moved. The brief that arrived with them had three walls coming out. What we did instead was open the arched openings back to their full radius, take all 212 square metres to one pale tone of lime plaster, and relay the floor in oak boards running the full 22 metres of the plan.
The floor and the walls
The oak has gone about two shades warmer, unevenly, which is what we wanted and what they were told to expect. It has moved fastest under the south window and slowest in the corridor. The boards took up perhaps a millimetre across their width through August and gave it back by November, and not one end joint opened, which is down to a moisture content we argued about with the supplier for a week.
The plaster marks, and it is meant to. There is a grey arc behind the dining chairs at the head of the table and a bloom around the switch by the front door. The labelled bucket of finish mix went with the apartment at handover and nobody has opened it. We took both marks back with a fine block in under half an hour, left the bucket where it was, and the wall reads as one tone again.
What the year changed
The brass has done the most visible work. Handles, hinges and the arcade fittings started the colour of a new coin, and they have gone brown where hands do not land and stayed bright where they do, so the wear pattern of the apartment is now drawn on its own door furniture. You can tell which of the two children is left handed.
The bench under the arcade, six metres in one piece, was the element we were least certain of. It is now the busiest object in the place. Shoes at one end, post in the middle, homework at the far end where the afternoon light lasts longest. Nobody has ever sat along all of it at once, and that turns out not to matter.
One thing we would draw differently. The switch line beside the arcade sits at 1150 above the floor, which suited the elevations and does not suit a family who come through the door with their arms full. A hundred millimetres lower and an elbow would reach it. It is the only note in the file from this visit, and it has already changed the two projects since.