05 — Notes

From the desk.

Three notes, not a journal. They are the decisions we repeat often enough that they belong on a page: how a board is cut down, how a corner works after dark, and why a plan without an hour on it is not finished.

Five material samples on oak: rough pale stone, light oak, frayed linen, a glossy ceramic tile, and a brushed steel disc — Five pieces. Stone, oak, linen, ceramic, steel. Not a palette. A shortlist with the rejects still visible.

October 2026

Five pieces, and the ones we put back

A board that arrives with twenty samples is a shopping list. A board with five is a decision, provided two of the five are allowed to lose. On the table in the photograph: a rough pale stone, a block of light oak, a square of linen with the edge left frayed, a glossy off-white ceramic, and a brushed steel disc the size of a pull.

Stone and oak are doing the work in most of the rooms we draw. They take the afternoon in Florentin without going yellow, and they take a wet umbrella in a shop without staining in a way we have to apologise for. The linen is for a curtain, or it is a curtain we cancel. Cancellation has to stay on the board. If the losing sample is removed, the next meeting starts from taste again, and taste is how a kitchen grows a second shelf of jars.

The ceramic was a splash behind a sink that the wall did not need. The steel disc was a pull for a cupboard that ended as a push-latch, because a pull at that height caught a sleeve. Both stayed in the photograph so the edit is visible. The shop where this exact board was decided is written out as a counter, and empty shelves. The method is the same on an apartment: five pieces, two may lose, nothing is added in the last week because a supplier had a remnant.

We do not publish a “materials library.” The city already has showrooms. What the desk keeps is the reason a piece was refused, in a sentence, on the sheet next to the piece that stayed.

Round oak pedestal table at night, linen runner, dark bowl, vase of dried stems, and a lit lamp with a paper shade — A corner after dark. One lamp with a paper shade. The window is already night; the curtain is there so the glass does not become a mirror of the bulb.

A lamp at the end of the day

Tel Aviv apartments are drawn in daylight and lived in after it. A dining corner that looks correct at noon — white wall, open window, a row of three pendants — is often harsh at eight, when the only task is two people and a bowl. Pendants multiply. They also assume a centre to the room. Corners do not have a centre. A single lamp on the table, shade in paper, bulb warm but not orange, is enough light to see a plate and not enough to turn the corner into a kitchen.

The table in the photograph is round, on a pedestal, because four legs and a rug waste the only floor a chair can pull into. The runner is linen and it is allowed to hang; a trimmed runner looks like a placemat that grew. Two chairs, not four. If four people come, the living room exists. Pretending every nook is a dining room for a holiday is how small flats fill up with furniture that has one job a year.

The curtain is heavy and it is drawn. At night an undressed window becomes a black mirror, and the lamp sits twice. We specify the curtain for that, not for a photograph of softness. Daylight in the same corner is a different problem and is handled on the plan of light, not by leaving the lamp on at four in the afternoon.

Where this kind of corner sits in the work we take: dining nooks.

Blank white sheets and a black pencil on a wooden desk, with sunlight across the upper corner — Before dimensions, the hour. The sheet is blank until the visit, and the visit is booked for late afternoon when the building allows.

Write the hour on the plan

A measured plan without a time on it is a diagram of walls. It will not tell you that the balcony in a new flat faces a facade that lights up at seven, or that a north room in Florentin is already dim when the south room in the Old North is still hot. Developer photographs are taken when the specification downlights look even. People eat when they get home.

So the first line on the sheet, before a dimension, is the hour we stood there and which way we were facing. If the building only allows a morning visit, the sheet says that too, and the scheme does not pretend we have seen the evening. Curtains, lamps, and the decision to leave a living room almost empty are all answers to that line. Furniture comes after. The contractor comes after the furniture. The order is the same as on the studio page, and it starts here, on a blank sheet, at a time of day written in the corner.