The Handmade House Read online

  By the end of the summer, we’d more or less finished the detailing. The children’s bathroom would have a red rubber floor and stainless-steel fittings; their bath would be a tiled tub with right-angled sides, like a rugby bath. Our bathroom would have limestone floors, a timber-surrounded sink, the bamboo trough and the skylight that opened. For the timber, which was now everywhere – shutters, cupboards, doors, desks – Joyce and Ferhan were keen on something called iroko, which we had never heard of, but which, they assured us, weathered to grey, or, if treated, to a rich reddish-brown. They didn’t actually say so, but a crucial factor in their enthusiasm was that it was cheaper than pine. I asked if it was sustainable, and they said yes; I questioned whether you could be sure where it came from; they said you could. And I wanted to believe them, because they wanted to use the iroko, and because my trust had become almost a self-fulfilling prophecy: I trusted, therefore they must be trustworthy.

  We had not, like their best and favourite clients, gone off on a three-month photographic assignment while they polished off the building. It may be true that you can’t make art by committee, but architecture is a uniquely social art, a process of acknowledging and submitting to context. Architecture must respect the surrounding buildings, the area, the lives of its future inhabitants. And if it’s true, generally speaking, that artists suffer from competing needs to get enough outside stimulation and to be left alone to develop their own ideas, then architects probably suffer more than most, because most of their external input is coming from people who have very muddled attitudes to them. As a client who wants a fabulous new building, you have quite a lot invested in believing that your architect is an artist, a creative genius possessing knowledge, intuition and inspiration. At the same time, you are the person with the most to lose should your architect get carried away with the notion that architecture is ultimately about art, rather than about life.

  7

  There are two ways of appointing builders, Joyce and Ferhan announced in May. You can put the project out to tender and see what happens, or you can pick a builder and negotiate the price. For reasons that I never fully grasped, and that seemed, when I thought about them, counter-intuitive, on this project they favoured the second.

  The builders they’d chosen were people they’d worked with before and trusted. Most importantly, they explained, these builders had an absolutely brilliant site manager, which would apparently make all the difference. Unfortunately, being so good, they were very busy, and we’d have to wait for them until late September. But if the securing of a brilliant site manager was important enough to dispense with giving these particular contractors the bracing uncertainty of getting the job as they priced it, and not to check that someone else out there couldn’t do it for half the price, who were we to argue?

  Of course, Joyce and Ferhan’s resolution to use a particular contractor would have made a whole lot more sense if there was something else going on. If they had an ulterior motive. If, say, these builders had some particular expertise that we needed, such as being especially good carpenters, and good carpentry was crucial to, for instance, concrete.

  The meeting with the concrete man had gone well. Joyce said he was ‘interesting’ and she and Ferhan took to dropping concrete into the conversation more and more: ‘in-situ concrete’, they would say, perhaps hoping this would confuse me. (As far as I could work out, in-situ concrete was brought to the site wet and gloopy, poured into a wooden mould and left to cure. When it was dry, the wood was peeled off, leaving the set concrete imprinted with whatever had been on the wood – a lot of splintery grain, in the case of the National Theatre; not very much at all, I hoped, in the case of our lane.) They showed us a picture of a building in the new Thames Barrier Park, which they said was beautiful. We peered at it. It looked like a bus shelter.

  I told my friend Richard Stepney, who cuts my hair, that our architects were trying to persuade us to have concrete. He said, ‘How would you react if I suggested a haircut I’d never done, which had been out of fashion for decades, that I wasn’t sure I could make work and most people thought looked ugly?’

  He had a point. It all seemed absurdly risky. In the discussions with Joyce and Ferhan, I would always say, ‘If we have concrete.’ There was a meeting early in July at which I did this so many times, with so many caveats – it had to be smooth, it had to be pale, it had not to have ugly wet streaks down it – that Joyce was obliged to accept that the usual methods weren’t working.

  She was forced to send us a letter.

  Dear Charlie and Geraldine [she wrote],

  Following our meeting on 5 July 2001, please confirm that you would like us to progress the design of the house using in-situ concrete walls for the load-bearing masonry walls.

  In the meeting we discussed the finish of the concrete. We explained that you should expect the concrete finish will not be free of imperfections of colour or texture. Each project will have its own variations depending on the weather, the contractor, the additives, the concrete mix, etc. However, the contractor has expressed confidence in building the concrete walls and we will ask for test panels to be constructed so that we can review the finish that will be achieved.

  We will advise the ready-mix company that you prefer a lighter-colour concrete and we can review the samples with various colour additives. As discussed, to minimize the grain effect on the concrete we will specify birch-faced plywood instead of shuttering plywood.

  We await your instructions,

  Yours sincerely,

  Joyce Owens.

  A few days later I sent back a reply, unhelpfully larded with neurotic equivocations:

  Charlie and I are happy to progress the design of the house on the basis that we will go for in-situ concrete walls. I have a couple of reservations/anxieties however. The first is over colour and blemishing. I sometimes find concrete oppressive and lugubrious. For this reason I am keen that the finish should be light (in the sense of pale).

  I accept that unevenness and blemishing can be charming, as it is in wood. What I dislike is the water-staining effect, which makes buildings look as though they have a damp problem. I don’t know whether this occurs at the time of construction or subsequently.

  And then I added some further worries about insulation and getting the concrete poured evenly, which were just reiterations of things Joyce and Ferhan had said could go wrong. What I hoped to imply here was, ‘There seem to be an enormous number of pitfalls. I am not qualified to judge, these being technical matters, but I expect that after you and the contractor and the structural engineer have given them proper thought, you’ll decide it’s just too risky.’

  And then I sat back and nursed my misgivings and waited for them to find out it couldn’t be done.

  *

  In August, we went on holiday to Colonsay, an island in the Inner Hebrides – or rather, five of us did. Hen was inter-railing around Europe with Matthew. Already the family that Joyce and Ferhan were supposed to house in all its heterodox untidiness was pulling apart, like planets in space.

  Hugo and Sue spent a fortnight on Colonsay every year. We were becoming like my parents and their friends Shirley and Laurie. But whereas Hugo and Sue always stay with the laird, at a house party in a magnificent manor house with vast kitchens (and a professional cook) and lovely gardens stuffed with interesting trees brought back from foreign parts by laird ancestors, we stayed in a damp cottage with lumpy beds. Colonsay is wild and remote and fringed by heart-stoppingly beautiful beaches of pale sand, rocks and clear, if icy, water. But one room in our rented cottage was too damp to use: you had to keep the door shut to prevent the musty, wet smell from escaping and wafting through the rest of the house, laying its insidious creeping fingers on the broken-spring beds.

  It wasn’t particularly easy for any of us to get a good night’s sleep, nor advisable, since a whole night in the same position meant persistent neck or back ache the following day. Charlie lay awake night after night on the miserable poking
mattress worrying about money. The tax bill was due in January – which, now that we were at the end of the summer, didn’t seem so far away. In July 2001, we’d paid 40 per cent of Joyce and Ferhan’s fees; by October, we would have to pay 80 per cent. In practice, this meant bills of £10,000, £7,000, £3,500, £7,800, £2,500, £7,800 hitting us at alarmingly close intervals through the school holidays and the start of term. The structural engineer, Brian Eckersley, had also sent in his first bill, for a couple of thousand. I could see the point of Brian, who would make sure the building didn’t fall down, but when we’d agreed to appoint him, I’d said nervously, ‘There won’t be any more hidden costs, will there?’ I’m not sure what Joyce and Ferhan had answered, but, since then, we’d acquired a party-wall surveyor to make sure we didn’t damage the walls on either side of us, plus party-wall surveyors to act for each of the neighbours (though we had to pay for them); a services engineer and the structural engineer’s drawing expert. Already it felt like we were employing half the building and allied tradespeople of Southern England.

  We’d had to plunder our savings to pay Tom Tasou and now, suddenly – whoops! – it appeared we had no money.

  Charlie spent the long, uncomfortable nights on Colonsay fighting the cold he was getting from the damp and making mental lists of people he could approach for work. When we got home he transferred the lists on to paper, and made the calls. He persuaded the technology-in-local-authorities organization to pay, but it was obvious the relationship was coming to an end. Then came the terrorist attacks of September 11th and, in their wake, many fears, one of them of global recession. It was not a good time to be looking for work, or, for that matter, writing a book about optimism. By the first week of October, it was impossible to get money out of a cashpoint; I paid for food with a credit card that gets paid off automatically the following month, and hoped that somehow there would be something in to cover it by then.

  The firm of contractors Joyce and Ferhan had chosen was called Varbud. It was owned by Ramesh Patel, who’d started it in 1980. Patel wasn’t really Ramesh’s name; his father had changed it from Visani when he’d emigrated from India to Kenya. Lux, Ramesh’s wife, who was a Patel before she married as well as afterwards, told me that her father claimed that he’d changed their name from Halai because it was easier for the British to pronounce. But I’m not sure how much easier Patel really is than Halai, or Visani, for that matter. Perhaps at some stage there was also a desire to escape other things. The name Patel, Lux told me dismissively, ‘is meaningless’ – a caste name and the most widely used surname in the world. Say ‘Visani’ or ‘Halai’ to a Gujarati, on the other hand, and they would immediately presume to know everything important about you: what group of villages your family originally came from, who your relations were, whether any of them had ever behaved scandalously.

  Ramesh was born in Kenya, the youngest of three sons. When he was nine, his father decided to go home to India and fulfil his ambition of building India’s first drive-in cinema (which he did; it’s still the largest drive-in cinema in the country). After his parents left, Ramesh stayed in Kenya with his older brothers, because the education was better (Ruda, the eldest, who really brought him up, now does all the ordering for Varbud).

  Ramesh moved to Britain when he was eighteen, to study quantity surveying at Middlesex Polytechnic. Not long after he’d graduated, he went camping in Europe with his friend Yogi and, sitting in their tent, they decided to start a business. Neither of them really had any money, so they each put in £50. There was never any question but that the business should be a construction company. The Patels were a farming caste originally but, as the land became less labour intensive, they diversified, and what they mainly diversified into was construction. According to my Gujarati friend Dilip (himself a sexual health counsellor turned garden designer), Gujaratis are particularly renowned for their joinery.

  Initially, Ramesh and Yogi ran Varbud in their spare time, in the evenings and at weekends, organizing labourers they knew to knock out fireplaces or build walls, and carpenters to make shelves. In 1982, an acquaintance from the Gujarati community asked them to build a house in Kingsbury. They gave up their day jobs. The project was successful, word got around, and from then on, they were never without work.

  By 1983, when Ramesh called Lux Patel’s father and asked permission to go out with his daughter, he was a pretty good prospect. Lakshmi (pronounced Luxshmi, but people were always getting it wrong) was twenty, and a nurse. Pretty and smart, she had already made it very clear she had no intention of having an arranged marriage like her sister. The older Mr Patel advised the younger one to ask her out himself. Initially, she was disdainful. ‘I’ve never seen you,’ she objected. ‘If I don’t like you, I shall probably vomit.’

  When they married in 1984, they bought a house in Kenton, in West London. Varbud set up in the box-room, and when Lux had two sons, she began doing the books and chasing payments.

  By 1990, they’d outgrown the back bedroom. Varbud moved to a warehouse on an industrial estate in Perivale, with room for a joinery shop and store room downstairs and offices upstairs. Today, the business employs forty people full-time and rarely takes on contracts worth less than £150,000.

  In a sector that relies heavily on trust (you can’t afford to employ plumbing subcontractors who don’t do the job properly) the Patels have the advantage of coming from a community where reputation is prized and carefully monitored. It matters what kind of a family you come from, what its standing in the community is, how much it gives back, whether its members behave themselves and live good, useful lives. In this community, Ramesh is highly respected. He employs a lot of people, the work they do is of high quality, he is devoted to his family and he spends a great deal of his time on charity work. Since his middle brother died, he also oversees the cinema business in India (his father is in his mid-eighties and has had several heart attacks), which necessitates at least three longish trips a year. When Lux told me that her kitchen at home wasn’t finished after five years, I thought, ‘Hmm, how interesting! Obviously doesn’t bother her much. It’s not embarrassing, even though she and Ramesh run a building firm… There must be other values here, more important than domestic display, to do with family and community and respectability.’ I did not draw the more obvious conclusion, that Varbud just takes a long time.

  Still, David Bennett, who had insisted on going to see their workshop, had been highly impressed by their carpentry. He’d decided they could be trusted to make the shuttering, with the proviso that everything must be cut and prepared in Perivale – ‘We want no cutting and hacking on site.’ Each piece of birch ply would be used three times, but in between it must go back to the workshop to be cleaned down and have release agent reapplied. This attention to detail was crucial. Tadao Ando, the Japanese architect whose simple, light-washed buildings are in large part responsible for the recent reassessment of concrete, has claimed that ‘the high standard of Japanese concrete building is based on our woodworking heritage. Concrete moulds must be made with great care and precision to produce a clean and perfect surface. As a matter of fact, I used to employ joiners to make my moulds.’ Well, we would have joiners with heritage too.

  Joyce and Ferhan showed us three types of contract, relating to different sizes of job. Although our project was borderline small to medium, they thought the medium-sized contract would give us better protection. They’d have to make some adjustments to the standard format, which would then have to be approved by our lawyer and Varbud’s lawyers; once they’d all finished arguing, we’d be ready to sign.

  ‘But we’re due to go on site next month,’ I yelped. ‘That’ll take ages!’

  ‘Oh, you don’t have to sign before you start,’ Joyce said airily.

  ‘But what if something goes wrong?’

  ‘The contract’s still valid. It’s quite common not to sign the contract until the job’s finished.’

  This seemed to me a pretty amazing contract, that wa
s binding even though you’d only ever glimpsed it upside down on someone’s desk. I tried to work out what would be the point of signing it after the job was finished. And presumably there wasn’t one, because we never heard of it again.

  The important thing seemed to be the letter of intent, which Joyce and Ferhan wrote on our behalf, and faxed over for us to sign and send to Varbud. This stated the contract sum (£474,000) with a defects liability period of twelve months. (This meant we would withhold 2.5 per cent of the money every time we got a bill. After a year, the builders would return and make good the things which had gone wrong – and Joyce assured us things always did go wrong: doors would drop and cupboards would shift – and we’d pay them what we owed.) The letter also stipulated the start date. Initially, we’d hung on for Varbud until September. Imperceptibly, this had turned into October. Now it had crept into November, with the 12th frequently mentioned as a good day. Varbud were still claiming that they’d start on the 12th, but the first week was now to be ‘preparation in the workshop’, whatever that meant (how hard do you have to prepare to dig up some ground?) and they would move on to site on Monday the 19th.

  The job would take twenty-eight weeks, plus two weeks off for Christmas and a week for Easter – which, from 19 November, took us to 30 June 2002. After this we were entitled to something called liquidated damages: compensation of £550 per week, which was roughly what we estimated we’d have to pay to rent somewhere.

  Meanwhile, Varbud sent us their costings. We sent them back, querying things, and demanded that they break them down room by room, so we didn’t just have a large sum (a very large sum, in fact) for ‘joinery’. But even after they’d revised their estimates and we’d questioned almost everything, even after the resulting adjustments had been made, we couldn’t get the cost down below £480,650. And Varbud still hadn’t priced for the bin store that we had to build as part of our agreement with Tom Tasou (which would take the price up to £483,400). There were a number of items on the list that were still provisional; Elaine, whose lateral conversion was now zinging along, said that a good rule with things marked provisional was to double them. One of our provisionals was, worryingly, the kitchen. That meant we were already more than £8,000 over budget, with the likelihood of some things coming in higher than estimated and no contingency. Joyce said a contingency of £20,000 would be safe.