The FC Leader's Office
A seat of power with a war map on the floor and a fire to work beside all night.
A room staged to be impressive that still has to be somewhere she can spend twelve hours.
The desk doesn't sit on the floor. It sits on a raised stone platform with a staircase climbing to it from either side, so crossing the room to speak to whoever is behind it means looking up, and choosing a flight to approach by. A gilt lion holds each front corner, a canopy hangs over the chair, and a balustrade closes the platform off from the rest of the floor. That half of the room is staged, and meant to be read that way.
The other half is where the work happens. A world map covers a low table in the middle of the floor, and the corner behind it carries a chalkboard of workings, a globe, and a wall of papers pinned up and strung together with red thread. Taken together they suggest a plan rather larger than Free Company scheduling.
What stops the whole thing reading as a throne room is the clutter. A lantern and a tea set have been left standing on the map rather than cleared off it, and the books have given up on the shelves and gone into knee-high stacks in the corner. Along the back wall a fireplace, a phonograph and one deep armchair make a corner with no grandeur in it at all — the part of the room where you can picture her at two in the morning, bent over the map with the tea going cold.
What went into it
- The desk raised on a stone platform, with a staircase to either side so it can only be reached by climbing
- Gilt lions at the platform corners and a canopy over the chair, holding the formal axis of the room
- A world map spread across a low table as the room's second centre, at floor height to answer the dais
- Papers pinned to the wall and strung together with red thread, beside a chalkboard of workings and a globe
- A lantern and a tea set left out on the map, so the plan reads as in progress rather than finished
- Books stacked knee-high on the floor once the shelves ran out
- Warm brick and dark timber on the study side against pale stone on the dais, so the two halves read as different rooms
- A fireplace, a phonograph and one armchair kept deliberately informal, so the grand half has something to sit against
Gallery