We did not set out to make closets. We set out to do a favor for a friend, in a room so small it had been used, for years, mostly as a place to lose things. The register starts at № 1001 because everything we have made since started there too.
The apartment was on Riverside Drive, high enough to see the river, old enough that the closet had been an afterthought even when the building was new. Sixty-two square feet. A single rod, a single shelf, a light on a pull-chain that had not worked in a decade. The owner — a friend, a person with too many good coats and no good way to keep them — asked, almost apologetically, whether anything could really be done with a space like that. The honest answer, which surprised us as we gave it, was that a space like that is the most interesting kind there is.
A small room forgives nothing. There is no slack, no wall you can afford to waste, no dimension you can round to the nearest convenient inch. Every decision in sixty-two square feet is load-bearing. We spent more hours measuring and drawing that closet than the closet itself would seem to justify, and somewhere in those hours the favor stopped being a favor and became a question we could not put down: what if a closet were treated with the seriousness of a room?
So we did the things we now do for every project, for the first time, without yet knowing they would become a method. We surveyed the room in three dimensions and found, as we always now find, that none of its corners were the angle they appeared to be. We drew it at full scale before a board was cut. We used the entire height — the nine feet that the original closet had ignored above five — and put drawers at the height of a hand rather than the height of a habit. We milled it in solid timber because the friend would open these drawers every morning for twenty years and plywood is a promise you break slowly. We cut the dovetails by hand, not because the room could see them, but because we could, and a thing you can do well is a thing you should not do badly.
And at the end, not knowing what else to do with the feeling of having finished it, we signed it. A small signed plate, engraved by hand, fixed inside the left return where only the owner would ever find it: № 1001. It was not a marketing decision; there was no firm yet to market. It was closer to the way a painter signs a canvas — an admission that the thing had been made by someone, on purpose, and that the someone stood behind it. Every project since has carried the next number. The plate inside your closet is the same gesture as the plate inside that one.
The friend has since described opening that closet, the first morning, as the moment the apartment finally felt finished — not the living room, which had been finished by a decorator, but the small room no guest would ever see. We have heard a version of that sentence many times now, in many neighborhoods, about many rooms. We did not understand, at № 1001, that we had heard the entire business plan. We thought we had built a closet. We had, in fact, decided what the next twenty years would be.
People assume the company began with a strategy — a positioning, a market, a name with a deliberate K and X. The strategy came later, and most of it was just the honest description of what we had already done in that room and could not stop wanting to do again. Make closets only. Make them like architecture. Draw before you cut. Mill in solid wood. Sign what you finish. None of it was invented at a desk. All of it was learned in sixty-two square feet on Riverside Drive, from a friend who only wanted somewhere to keep her coats.
The closet is still there. We have been back; we keep the drawings, for that one as for all of them, which means we could rebuild it from the file tomorrow if it were ever lost. It will not be lost. It is sixty-two square feet of evidence that the small rooms are worth the seriousness — which is the only thing we have ever really had to say, and the reason the register did not start at zero. It started at one, because by then we already knew there would be a second.
On the founding · Published Spring MMXXIV