The Library

Our reference was the All Souls College Library at Oxford. What we borrowed was its logic: a galleried upper tier, a strong horizontal cornice dividing the two floors, fluted pilasters that set the rhythm, and a procession of books as the room's primary surface. Because the existing ceiling has steep angles, we documented them first with a 3D laser scanner and then created a 3D model in Revit, which allowed us to thread two stories of precision millwork into a non-orthogonal A-frame.

From there, we let the room get more darksome than people expect. The entire library envelope, cabinetry, columns, dentil cornice, and all, is finished in a deep charcoal green that reads almost black at night. The shelf fronts are caged in fine blackened brass wire mesh instead of glass, sourced from a specialty fabricator, so the spines breathe. A pressed-tin panel lines the soffit above the French doors that open through the library wall. Linear sconces are recessed into the pilasters so the light appears to come from inside the millwork itself, and every shelf is washed from within. Against all of that, the seating is deliberately quiet: a linen sectional, a single tobacco leather bolster, oxblood and ink velvet pillows, a faceted dark coffee table on a graphic grid rug.

The room has a real axis. Library on one long wall, a moving glass wall opposite, opening onto a patio and the surrounding hills. It turns into a movie screening room at night when blackout drapery closes across the glass, a hidden movie screen rolls down in front of it, and a projector hidden between the two tiers of the library throws a movie across the room. The client has already hosted movie nights here, guests on the linen sectional, the gable disappearing into the dark above them, no one with any idea that there is a bed ten feet overhead.