The Handmade House Read online

  Much later, I gained further insight into the non-existent sustainability, when I attended a talk Ferhan gave at the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA). Someone in the audience asked whether, if you were undertaking a large-scale project, it didn’t make sense automatically to incorporate sustainable elements? He hadn’t, he said with some concern, heard much about this in the initial presentation. Ferhan responded by talking about the stringency of building-control regulations, the need sometimes to get round them, and Azman Owens’s skill at getting building control enforcers to see their point of view.

  Clearly, if we’d wanted an environmentally radical building, we should have hired different architects.

  By May, all the children’s bedrooms had moved upstairs, following a sort of game of musical spaces that also gave me a proper study in what had until then been the den (which was now in Hen’s former room inside the front door, next to the kitchen). This shift also had several less beneficial consequences, not all of which were immediately apparent. The den shrank. So did the store room. For months afterwards, whenever I couldn’t think of a place for something (vases/shoe polish/brooms) I’d say blithely, ‘Oh, well, we’ll keep it in the store room,’ not realizing that the storage space in the store room had now been reduced to roughly the size of one kitchen cupboard. Joyce and Ferhan never, in fact, referred to it as the store room again, but always as the utility room. And really, they should have called it the narrow utility corridor.

  Meanwhile, it was time for us to make some effort. Joyce and Ferhan set various bits of homework: measuring the height and the length in shelf space of our books; compiling a list of what we needed to keep in the kitchen cupboards; taking home a rough wardrobe plan and testing it against the reality of our clothes. Among other things, this wardrobe plan contained a shelf marked ‘seasonal handbags’.

  ‘What on earth are they?’ Charlie asked.

  ‘They’re handbags for different seasons,’ I said superciliously, showing off in front of Joyce and Ferhan, though I had never owned such a thing.

  ‘Very important,’ added Joyce.

  Until then, my tactic with handbags had been to buy one and use it relentlessly until it developed a hole or the lining was so torn that my keys regularly got lost in it, when I would stuff it down behind the chair in our bedroom, just in case I wanted it again in future. Needless to say, I had never yet retrieved a bag from this graveyard of leatherware. But – and this shows just how useful architects are – as soon as I had the notional shelf for seasonal handbags (not even the shelf itself) I found I needed the bags to go on it. I now have a number of seasonal handbags, taking up even more than their allotted space in my wardrobe.

  Meanwhile, to help with my thinking about the kitchen, I went to visit Hugo, who, since he once worked in a professional kitchen, not only has a proper batterie de cuisine like they tell you in cookery books, but knows how to arrange it. He let me poke about in his cupboards without once having to say, ‘Well, of course the balloon whisk isn’t really meant to live behind the sugar.’

  Style cramps life, and life erodes style, the biologist, inventor and ‘long view’ advocate Stewart Brand has written. And I’d be inclined to agree, except that it isn’t true of Hugo, who not only managed without having on show all the things that cluttered up my surfaces – bread boards, food mixer, microwave, toaster – but didn’t actually have much inside his cupboards either. About once a month, he explained to me seriously, while I admired his arrangement of wooden spoons, he goes through the kitchen and moves out anything he isn’t using regularly. I had cake tins in my kitchen cupboard that I’d used once, thirteen years ago; I had a jelly mould that was rusty but which I kept simply because I didn’t have another one. I went straight home and filled eight bin bags with kitchen rubbish.

  Other useful tips I picked up from Hugo’s kitchen and added to my Kitchen List for Joyce included:

  china and glass near dishwasher

  shallow drawer next to hob for cooking implements

  deep drawers underneath it for saucepans

  olive oils, salt, pepper, nutmeg, Marigold bouillon, etc. at convenient height by the hob

  a shelf in a cupboard for anything that people put down on your surfaces – bank statements, letters from school, toys from party bags – which, if not removed by owners within a week, will just be thrown away(!)

  pull-out bin in a drawer underneath the main chopping surface, preferably stainless steel for easy cleaning

  For some reason, probably to do with the number of times the kitchen cupboards were reconfigured, a door, rather than a drawer, was finally allocated for the bin, which rather undermined the idea of carelessly sweeping your choppings towards you (i.e. now on to your feet). It also limited the size of bin to one that could hang on the inside of a door – in other words, to one wholly unsuitable for a family that produces a small landfill of rubbish every week. In the end, I tore off the bin in disgust so I could use the cupboard for something else, and today my bin is a black plastic bag on the floor. Charlie hates this and is always muttering about getting a ‘proper’ bin but I like the plastic bag arrangement. At least you can chuck it outside when people are coming.

  Our kitchen budget was £17,000, including appliances, which is not excessively high in these days of extendable mortgages (and would buy you, in fact, about one-fifth of a fancy German kitchen). This meant that all the cupboard doors could be custom made, but what went inside them had to come out of a catalogue of kitchen fittings. (Hence, perhaps, the difficulty with the drawer-bin.) One of Hugo’s clever kitchen things was a knife drawer with a wavy base, for keeping knives separate from one another. Joyce and Ferhan ignored my plaintive references to this until it was clear I wasn’t going to stop going on about it, when they said I should look into getting it made myself. But I knew no one who carved wood into wave devices. I realized, what’s more, that one of the great pleasures of employing an architect is not having to find such a person. Not having to do very much work at all, in fact, beyond opening one’s mind to the possibility of seasonal handbags. Not having to trail around shops, bewildered by the hubbub and the choice and the necessity of making a decision.

  I had hated trailing around shops in which you had to make decisions, rather than buy, ever since I was a child and my parents had displayed an incomprehensible ability to spend whole Saturdays in the Bakers Arms Carpet Centre, while I gnawed my knuckles to stop myself from screaming and feared that I might simply, before I had been allowed to grow up, go mad. So it was restful to decide that you were going to trust someone else when they said you should have either this door handle or that one. (Joyce and Ferhan showed us two stainless-steel handles, helpfully attached to pieces of wood, and we had to try them and say which one was more comfortable, which would then be used around the house. The handles looked remarkably similar, but it’s possible that even here we were directed; my recollection is that one was significantly easier to use than the other.)

  Until then, I had always thought people who employed interior designers were a bit odd: why would you want to be bossed about by someone who thought their taste was superior to yours? But, somehow, employing an architect was different. For one thing, we had little sense of how our as yet non-existent house would look, or the way it would work. For another, we were clueless. It was getting on for ten years since we’d done up our house in London Fields and we hadn’t done it properly even then: we were still living with a decorated fingerplate on our bedroom door, white china with little roses, left there by the previous owner, who had originally shown us the bedroom saying, ‘It’s a very sexy room, don’t you think?’ so was evidently not entirely sane. And we were dealing with universal principles, which Joyce and Ferhan had access to and we didn’t.

  But I did insist on an American fridge. I had only stayed in one American household where such a fridge was in use and it was mainly used to store something called iced tea, which came out of a bottle and tasted nothing like tea, plus a
large assortment of fizzy drinks and snacks. (The stuff my children call ‘food’, as in ‘There’s no food in the house’ when the house is actually full of lettuce and apples and cheese and bread and things that do admittedly require some cooking.) The teenagers in the American household would gravitate to the fridge whenever they entered the kitchen, so you mostly ended up having conversations with their bottoms as they fished for snacks. This particular fridge, then, was not a great advertisement for anything, and Charlie even wrote a column for the New Statesman citing the big fridge as the root of the American obesity problem, because it had to be filled with food, which then had to be eaten. Ban big fridges and you could slash healthcare costs, was his policy.

  But since then my sister had acquired an American fridge, which was impressive mainly for incorporating an ice dispenser that sent big chunks or delicate slivers of ice, depending on your mood, crashing into your glass. I am shallow, but I wanted one of these. Joyce and Ferhan drew a normal-sized fridge on their original plans because the proportions were more elegant. But I was adamant. The kitchen had to be drawn and redrawn several times, but, finally, after several detours – an extra sink, a ‘coffee station’, whatever that is, a counter top at right angles that quickly got rubbed out again – our enormous ice dispenser found a place.

  Architects may have started out as top tektons, but at some point they became – certainly in popular imagination – less like builders, more like artists. The trouble with art, though, is that it is essentially non-functional, it actively aspires to be impractical, and it despises the conventional and manically pursues the new. None of this seems conducive to the creation of buildings that are easy to live in. So when Joyce and Ferhan simply took for granted that we would have taps made by a company called Vola, ‘Because we like them and we use them a lot’, we were torn between trusting them – which we wanted to do because we’d already invested a lot in this emotionally – and being very alarmed. The Vola taps looked OK, from their picture, in a way that was scarcely there, which was presumably the point of them; but fundamentally, we could only hope that this house would be habitable, and not only by architects with their funny ideas about two toys at a time and not producing much rubbish, but by us. It is the job of architects to save clients from themselves, it has been claimed; in the constant tension that this entailed, we had to hope we weren’t being saved from ourselves in the manner of one of those religious suicide cults.

  While we – OK, they – were designing the house, I read one of the few books that has ever been written about architecture from a client’s point of view. Suzanne Frank is an architectural historian and the owner of Peter Eisenman’s House VI, which was completed in New England in the summer of 1975, and her book, published in 1994, Peter Eisenman’s House VI, The Client’s Response, or at least my copy of it, came with what may well be the best errata slip ever:

  Cover: The drawing is printed upside down. It is printed correctly on page 105. P.105: The drawing in the upper right-hand corner is printed backwards.

  As soon as you start looking at the drawings, though, you realize why the publishers had such a struggle. Eisenman is a deconstructivist, I suppose: at any rate, his architecture is abstract, literary and self-referential. Not all of his previous V houses had been built, which makes sense, because they approach the condition of conceptual art. (Eisenman once told Newsweek that his buildings were ‘designed to shake people out of their needs’.) And, like conceptual art, the conscious revelation is only available once; there has to be something more than a cerebral point – has to be some mystical or emotional experience – for the work to remain interesting. And the main emotion that it seems to me Eisenman’s House VI would generate is irritation.

  I hoped that Joyce and Ferhan weren’t trying too hard to shake us out of our needs, because the consequences for Suzanne Frank had not been great. (This would not necessarily be her opinion.) Her worktops are the wrong height, to fit some complex system of planes that Eisenman devised, meaning people had continually to bend over. Conversation at mealtimes is virtually impossible because of a column that descends into the only space available for a dining table (for no structural reason). There is only one bathroom and you have to go through the master bedroom to get to it. Eisenman’s system of floorlighting required that Frank and her husband sleep in single beds. (Eventually, greatly daring, they refused to put up with this any longer.)

  In an Afterword, Eisenman explains:

  In House VI, the experience of the physical environment does not lead to any mental structure – the experience is, in fact, quite the reverse. Once the conceptual structure is understood, it detaches itself from the initial physical experience… In House VI, a particular juxtaposition of solids and voids produces a situation that is only resolved by the mind’s finding the need to change the position of the elements.

  It is not entirely clear what he means here, but I think it’s that he put things in the ‘wrong’ place to make us think about whether the ‘right’ place is merely culturally conditioned. Too bad, of course, if it isn’t. Too bad if the right place has been arrived at by experience, because the wrong one is bloody uncomfortable.

  Joyce and Ferhan were of course strictly form-follows-function architects: there would be no staircases going nowhere to make us ponder the idea of a staircase in our house, no doors that didn’t close the opening to the master bedroom, simply to be the sign of a door, to make us think about doors. Even so, we had stopped worrying about how we’d feel if the house was all about us and people didn’t like it, and moved on to what it would be like if the house was all about Joyce and Ferhan and we didn’t like it.

  How much did they know about us anyway? Ferhan once told me that she’d always thought of me as a very sexy woman, which marked her out as a person of great insight and discernment, although I suspected she just thought this because I’d told her I had an underwear weakness and needed plenty of space for my lingerie.

  Just as we could never have turned the confusion of our dreams and anxieties into three-dimensional space (even if Charlie did buy an architect’s pencil, identical to Ferhan’s, and brought it to meetings), they couldn’t know us from the inside. Dwelling, says Ivan Illich in The Mirror of the Past, ‘is an activity that lies beyond the reach of the architect not only because it is a popular art; not only because it goes on and on in waves that escape his control; not only because it is of a tender complexity outside of the horizon of mere biologists and systems analysts; but above all because no two communities dwell alike’.

  I loved the detailing stage of the design, looking forward to meetings at which I was invariably presented with something that opened up possibilities of a new way of living – a bench along the kitchen wall, where the family would sit and talk to me while I was cooking; floor lights that would glow softly when I came in on dusky winter evenings; a trough in our bathroom in which we would grow tall bamboo. But at the same time, the experience I was most reminded of was being on a camel in the Sinai which bolted down an enormous sand dune.

  While we were waiting for the planners to turn their attention to us and floundering around with Tom Tasou, Elaine had quietly bought the house next door to hers in London Fields and employed an architect to knock the two into one – lateral conversion, it’s called (offering magazine sub-editors a rarely missed opportunity to use the headline ‘lateral thinking’ over articles about it), so by now there was a lot of showing of drawings and comparing of progress. I could tell she thought I was a wimp for simply looking at a picture of Vola taps and saying, ‘Yeah, fine, OK,’ without demanding to see a whole bunch of tap catalogues. I worried sometimes that I was like Peer Gynt peeling the onion in the play, and that if Joyce and Ferhan only peeled away for long enough with their Vola taps and Guido beige limestone I would be exposed as nothing, a universal principles victim.

  Henrietta and Freddie had a much clearer sense of themselves. Fred came to an early detailing meeting at which kitchen materials were discussed:
stainless-steel worktops and cupboard doors, timber, glass. Even if you knew nothing about architecture – and Freddie loved buildings – there could be no doubt that the house was going to look simple, cool, sleek. As we were coming down the stairs from the office, he turned to me and said: ‘Can my bedroom be gothic?’

  Hen later produced a picture of what appeared to be a penthouse flat, which vaguely reminded me of the place where Michael Douglas had lived in the movie Wall Street, with a mezzanine approached by a spiral staircase, on and under which at least twenty people were partying. Would it be OK, she asked, if we got Joyce and Ferhan to make her bedroom like that?

  Harry and Ned were too young to have views. Harry regarded the project as an eccentric parental preoccupation roughly on a par with reading newspapers at breakfast or checking emails i.e. tiresome but not actively harmful. Both of them were still young enough to trust that not only were our intentions benign, but the results would be too. The only aspect of the project in which Harry displayed any interest at all was the tree-house. ‘It can be really simple,’ he announced. ‘I don’t mind what it’s like, as long as it has a television.’

  We did insist on some things. Initially there were no desks in Henrietta and Freddie’s rooms. In their enthusiasm to think about our long-term occupation of the house, I think Joyce and Ferhan had already despatched the two older children to lofts in Hoxton, or at least to flats above the betting shop in Kingsland Road, even though Hen was in the thick of A-levels and planning four years at university and Freddie hadn’t even started GCSEs.

  I was also firm about lighting. I felt I knew something about this, on account of there being a chi-chi lighting shop in Islington. Admittedly, I had been asked by the staff of this shop that no member of my family ever again attempt to dismantle one of their pieces, after I’d returned a standard lamp in seven sections. But I didn’t care for the pendant lamps Joyce and Ferhan were suggesting to hang above the kitchen table and in the corner of the sitting room and volunteered to find my own. The minutes of that meeting merely recorded that the light fittings had yet to be decided.