339 Texas Street
![](18_The_Hidden_Door_and_Moving_Mirrors_files/shapeimage_1.png)
339 Texas Street
The Hidden Door and Moving Mirrors
The hidden door was the solution to both an esthetic consideration and a design requirement.
With a hallway already lined with three bedroom doors and two bathroom doors, adding a door for the pantry/laundry room seemed excessive. An additional door in the main living area would have broken up the sight lines of the entry into the grand room, as well as those looking back along the wall into the hallway. Further more, like the rest of the house, strict attention to sound attenuation was an important consideration and providing mass and oversized wall thickness allowed for decreasing the impact of washer/dryer use.
Although the door offers the obvious treat to the first time user, it was designed for constant, everyday use. Among other things, it was of paramount importance that it could be opened and closed with two fingers (easier than a normal door), that it moved effortlessly and with surprising grace, and that it could handle hundreds of pounds of additional load (books, kids hanging, etc)... and of course, that it was almost totally "invisible" to the casual eye. Esthetically the shelving it carries was designed to fit seamlessly into the feel of the living area and functionally it performs flawlessly as a pantry or a washer-dryer room.
The rest of the "hidden" cabinet doors throughout the house are plays on the hidden door itself. Like many other design details and material throughout the house, they carry forward the practical and esthetic nature of the hidden door, each offering in their own way both function and form.
The genesis of the moving mirrors are much the same as the hidden door: form required a continuity of the space and function required a practical solution to every day needs.
In the main living area, the mirror provides balance to the South wall of the space and it reflects the light and views of the city scape even while facing away from the city. In the bathroom, it is the "absence" of the mirror that provides the views and light, and as the mirror rises, it provides the necessary function of a master bath.
Like everything else in the house, the moving mirrors are designed to last dozens of years... and to be repairable if they ever fail - it was this requirement that offered the greatest challenge (how can you remove something so big and heavy without requiring complete disassembly of the cabinetry, etc).
Monday, October 18, 2010