The Handmade House Read online

  It was at this point that I finally realized that I was in the presence of the great concrete expert. David Bennett was a broad man of medium height with improbable iron-grey hair balanced precariously on top of his scalp. He spoke in a low but oddly not unmusical monotone, without appearing to draw breath.

  David Bennett told me that he ‘fell in love with the idea of concrete’ in Iraq, when he was working as a civil engineer on irrigation projects in the south-eastern desert before the first Gulf War. Aware that the canals he was constructing could have been a concrete eyesore, he wanted to make them something else, and discovered in the process that he had ‘an affinity with the material, this natural understanding’. Back in Britain, he went to work for the Cement and Concrete Association as an all-round concrete proselytizer for seven years before setting himself up as an architectural consultant, a sort of human irrigation channel for Concrete Knowhow.

  Now he was concerned about my response to the black stripe across the first wall.

  ‘Oh, I like it,’ I said shamelessly, the woman who’d wanted white concrete. ‘It’s lovely: like looking at a picture, or a cloud formation, or the ripples in a pool.’

  He wasn’t sure how it had happened: whether the prop in the middle had sprung out a bit when the concrete was poured in, or had been pushing so hard that the formwork absorbed more water around it. ‘But that’s the beauty of concrete,’ he said happily, ‘you can never be sure exactly what you’re getting. We couldn’t do it again if we wanted to.’

  The birch-faced ply, he said, had added something he hadn’t anticipated, ‘because there are very fine little fissures in it and as a result the water absorbency changes over the surface, so that although it looks smooth at first glance, when you inspect it, you see that there’s this little flecking all over it: beautiful. This is Ivy Grove Grey. There will never be another concrete like it, because this is a handmade house.’

  The second wall was on the other side of the sitting room. Joyce and Ferhan had said repeatedly that they had based this room on Ferhan’s elegant, first-floor, three-bay, Georgian drawing room. But now that the two long walls were up, the room was looking distinctly like a corridor. What did they mean by ‘based on’? Half the size of? And had they considered, when they did their basing, that it might make a difference where the windows were?

  One whole side of this room would be window. Unfortunately, it was the short side, whereas presumably Ferhan’s windows were strung, jewel-like, across the long wall of her room, so that light poured into every corner. Ours, I suspected, was going to look more like the light at the end of a tunnel.

  Christopher Alexander, Professor of Architecture at Berkeley, has written that ‘when plate-glass windows became possible, people thought they would put us directly in touch with nature. In fact, they do the opposite.’ For many years, Alexander has been engaged in a project to analyse and catalogue architectural forms in an attempt to demonstrate his theory that the most attractive of these are not a subjective matter. They are a delight for all time, because they share certain essential attributes with forms in nature. His 1977 book, A Pattern Language, attempts to lay down rules that he derives from these principles. Some of these seem rather obvious – people prefer houses in which there is plenty of natural light – and some are beguiling because they seem to make sense, although you probably wouldn’t have thought of them yourself (as a non-architect, anyway): ‘The life of a public square forms naturally around its edge. If the edge fails, then the space never becomes lively.’ He claims that everybody likes window seats, and that rooms with windows on two sides are cheerier, both of which may well be true. But much of the book is a long howl of protest against modernism. And we were doing nearly everything wrong. ‘A building in which the ceiling heights are all the same is virtually incapable of making people feel comfortable,’ he writes severely. ‘Houses with smooth hard walls made of prefabricated panels, concrete, gypsum, steel, aluminium, or glass always stay impersonal or dead.’ I could only hope that Professor Alexander’s Casaubon-like project was misconceived.

  All the cages for the reinforcing went up in the next few weeks, so that you could soon see where the downstairs walls were going to be. They were, indeed, all going to be concrete. And, as I’d feared, there didn’t seem to be enough space for them (and presumably they’d be even bigger once they were sodding great walls and not just delicate meshes of steel). Freddie said whenever someone wanted to come into the kitchen, someone else would have to leave.

  I thought about remonstrating with him. I considered protesting that this house wasn’t one of those things that adults did – like having relationships and careers – that somehow relegated him; but I looked at the cages and my confidence ebbed away. Instead I took his £20 bet that he’d be able to cross his room in fewer than ten paces and privately tried it out (on the floor below, obviously: we were still a long way from getting upstairs) only to find that you could cover the distance comfortably in fewer than three.

  Everyone seemed to be anxious. The more the house looked like a house, the less it looked like a house we could live in. Early in June, by which time we had most of the walls downstairs, Harry asked: ‘Are we having wallpaper in our new house?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘we’re leaving the walls bare.’

  ‘So we’re painting them?’

  ‘No… er, we’re just leaving them.’

  ‘What,’ he said incredulously, ‘so you can see the concrete?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘Ugh!’

  There were still design issues to be resolved. Joyce and Ferhan had struggled to fit in the American fridge, wrestling with every conceivable kitchen configuration until eventually they’d managed to find the necessary 90 centimetres. And then I went to the fridge shop and discovered that there is no two-door ice-dispensing American fridge narrower than 92 centimetres.

  We tried reorganizing again: we could only get the fridge in if we did away with some cupboards. Then there was another problem: American fridges were not only remarkably wide but deep; it would stick out. I went back to the fridge shop and grumpily chose the most expensive fridge I could find that didn’t have two doors or sticking-out bits. It was made by Gaggenau and had a beautiful frosted-glass front with aluminium surround. I asked Joyce to look it up in the catalogue, thinking she would applaud me on my spirit of compromise. She called back to say she didn’t like it. It introduced, she said, another material to the kitchen. I was crestfallen – after all these months of Joyce and Ferhan education, I couldn’t even choose a tasteful fridge. But then, in the night, I woke up feeling furious. Joyce was an American: how could she not know that American fridges were 92 centimetres? It seemed to me that she thought a fridge is a fridge is a fridge, and the most important thing about it was that it was hidden behind a slab of wood and didn’t spoil the line of her units.

  A couple of weeks later, I admitted defeat. I chose an integrated fridge. To get the size I needed, I had to pick one with a very small freezer compartment, which meant having a second, free-standing freezer under the counter in the store room. Which, of course, meant even less room for storing things.

  The other matter on which I’d had some opinions of my own was lighting. Having dismissed Joyce and Ferhan’s suggestion of the pendant light that looked like an artichoke, I had to come up with something to replace it. Sure enough, I found what I considered to be a very fine horizontal disc of opaque glass held in an arc of stainless steel. Elaine and Clive had one rather like it, so I knew it would look good. All the same, I felt rather nervous about presenting it to Joyce and Ferhan because we were not in the habit of making design suggestions to them. And unlike the fridge, I couldn’t pretend it was really about practicality.

  They said it was overdesigned.

  There clearly wasn’t really any room for discussion. Chastened, I quickly flicked through the book pretending there were other light fittings in which I was equally interested. I liked a simple amber globe. So did they.
They asked to borrow the catalogue. At the next meeting, they announced that it was too big.

  Too big? For our elegant room based on Ferhan’s? I had never dismissed a light fitting or a lamp before on the grounds of its being over-large. It had never occurred to me in the area of lights that size matters. That, apparently, only started bothering you when you hired architects and let them design you a corridor.

  A fireplace, like the American fridge, had been in my original brief but had somehow been overlooked, possibly in the hope that I might simply forget about it. But I kept on asking where it was going to be. By this stage, Ferhan wasn’t sitting in on the design meetings, on account of the detailing being so detailed; but to explain the fireplace, she sat down next to Joyce, poured herself a coffee and said: ‘So. Have you told them that if they have a fireplace they can’t have a television?’

  It was a joke, but it was a Ferhan-joke, i.e. we could have a television at one end of the slate bench and a fireplace scooped out of the other if we absolutely insisted, but she couldn’t be expected to approve of it. Still, on the whole, the design meetings were, as Charlie said, two parts therapy to one part practicality: a relief from the anxiety of visiting the site and worrying about why nothing much had happened, or lying awake wondering where we were going to get the next slug of money from, since the builders’ bills were coming in to a schedule unknown to the Woolwich Building Society.

  Charlie had managed, just about, to stick to his tax bill schedule, if only by sometimes using money that was supposed to pay the builders. He’d developed a new strand to his career, as a speaker, which helped to top up the money he was getting for his various projects. But our bank account, in those months, must have looked very odd: lump sums coming in and almost immediately going out, lurching from what looked like wealth to extreme insolvency. On the whole though, things were easier now that we had access to money, even if we had to juggle income to pay bills for which it wasn’t earmarked and then hope vaguely that we could cope later. The process, as Charlie said, was like being on a roller-coaster: we were so focused on crawling up the next ramp or edging round the next bend that we failed to notice how high off the ground we were.

  ‘Oh, you’re going to have so much space!’ Joyce and Ferhan would cry intermittently in our therapeutic design meetings, while we, lulled back into the delightful, design-phase sense of optimism and possibility, would nod dumbly and almost, for a moment, believe them.

  We started looking at furniture, dragging Harry and Ned through furniture shops in a way that reminded me unpleasantly of the Bakers Arms Carpet Centre. Both boys seemed to think the furniture in these shops was for climbing over and sitting on, when it was obviously only meant to be looked at and perhaps occasionally lightly indented by glamorous adults who were too busy taking business trips to Milan to hang around long enough to spoil the cream covers. None of the furniture looked like it was meant to share house room with people who usually had chocolate round their mouths and honey on their hands. Still, we did eventually find a sofa with deep sides for the den, on which we could imagine three or four of us snuggled down watching television early on gloomy autumn Saturday evenings. We measured up. It was way too big for the room. And it wasn’t even as if this particular sofa was especially large. In the shop it had looked quite modest. We checked, and rechecked. We measured, and did sums. We wondered if perhaps we were in millimetres when we should have been in centimetres. Apparently not. We put it aside for the time being and found another sofa, for the sitting room this time: L-shaped, which we thought might mitigate the impression of a long thin waiting room. The long part, inevitably, was absolutely fine, but the chaise sticking out of the bottom would have hit the wall. (This was the sofa that Joyce said was overstuffed, so we couldn’t have had it anyway.) I lay awake at night wondering how a brief for a bigger house could possibly have issued in a house that was too small to furnish. Charlie said he supposed it was rather late in the day to have got out our rulers.

  The ground-floor walls were poured at the rate of around one every week to ten days, which was a lot slower than on Ramesh’s latest, ever-optimistic schedule. Still, the pace was slightly less painful now that there was something to show for it. We were ready to pour the first-floor slab by early June; according to Brian Eckersley, this was probably the most technically troublesome aspect of the building, because it had to span 7 metres of kitchen, between two walls that didn’t even reach its outer edge, then cantilever out to the garden. Since there were to be no columns or beams, all the support for it had to be contained within the structure itself. As a cementitious material, Brian explained, concrete is very strong in compression but weak in tension; in other words, it will take heavy vertical loads on top of it, but string it across a big distance between two walls and it has a tendency to sag. That could be solved only by the organization of the reinforcement: it made a difference whether the bars were at the top or bottom, pointing towards the garden or the lane, and how they intersected; and that was both a complicated mathematical calculation and a nightmare to draw.

  But the slab went up, supported, initially, by vertical poles. And then, just as the house was beginning to look slightly more like a house, less like a druidic arrangement of megaliths, things mysteriously ground to a halt.

  Joyce went away, initially to celebrate Ferhan’s birthday on a boat on the Bosphorous and then for a week on a Turkish beach; by the time she came back in early July we had drifted past our original deadline for the house to be completed and still had no upstairs walls. It was difficult to see any progress while she’d been away. When she called Ramesh she had to ask him to shut up about her holiday because she didn’t want to be pleasant.

  It was agreed that there should be a sort of crisis summit meeting at the site on Tuesday, 9 July. By then, Varbud had managed to pour one of the upstairs walls. But that still left all the rest. Ramesh opened the meeting by muttering gravely about how difficult this project had been, how much he’d underestimated the time it would take to build the formwork, and how much money they’d already lost. (Joyce and Ferhan also claimed that they’d lost money and, unless Joyce’s time was worthless, I couldn’t see how it could possibly be otherwise.)

  Charlie and I couldn’t get Varbud straight. We couldn’t work out whether they were dreamers, craftsmen pottering away at their own pace in a mist of goodwill, the sort of romantics who might move halfway across the world to open a drive-in cinema, or whether they were clever and calculating and just very good at making this look like an Indian drive-in thing while they played us along.

  Ramesh laid out a new plan of action: they’d pour the second upstairs wall tomorrow, another the following Tuesday or Wednesday, and then bring in a new team to start building the reinforcing for the roof slab at one end of the house while they continued to build the formwork for the vertical walls at the other end. In this way, he expected to have poured the roof slab by 26 July. And after that, it would take only six weeks: his people were used to fitting out thirty flats in that time, so one (small) house shouldn’t present a problem. In any case, he said, we shouldn’t worry about the recent lack of progress, because they were doing a lot on the joinery back in the workshop.

  Charlie said something about the importance of getting it right. (As Joyce, Charlie and I all kept neurotically reassuring one another, Varbud were taking a great deal of care. And we were conscious that if we applied too much pressure we could end up with shoddier work.) But he also explained about having sold our house to the people who were hanging on for us, and that having created some urgency.

  Still, if Ramesh’s predictions were correct, Varbud would be finished in early September. A few weeks earlier – before the recent vegetative period set in – Joyce had predicted that they wouldn’t be finished before late September or early October. But even if we added a month to Ramesh’s schedule, that was still OK, because there was all the chaos of the summer holidays to get through between now and then. Soon the house would be full all da
y every day, and, between the demands for money and attention, and telling people to turn their music down and stop fighting, I’d be finding it difficult enough to work, without having to move as well.

  I asked Joyce quietly what she thought of Ramesh’s timings, and she shrugged.

  No one mentioned the penalty clause. This was partly because we’d now accepted so many different schedules that we weren’t entirely sure when it was supposed to come into operation. But we were also so far from being finished that if we were to impose it now, I feared we could make Varbud bankrupt. And then the house would never be finished and we’d go bankrupt too.

  Meanwhile, in the time that Charlie and I had been focusing on the house and apparently making very little progress, Hen had been having a whole lot of new and vivid experiences, not all of them pleasant (in fact, most of them quite disillusioning), including acquiring a fungus that it would take her years and a stringent diet to get rid of. She finally arrived back at Heathrow at dawn one Saturday morning in June: not terribly well, and dreadfully saddened by the death back in England of one of her friends – which was why she was back earlier than expected – but relieved to be home.

  When she’d left, I’d thought we might be in the new house, or at least on the point of moving in by the time she returned. It was now clear we wouldn’t be in the new house until after she’d started at university. But even then, I told myself, she’d come back for long stretches; I just had to hope that my anxieties about size were exaggerated. The last thing I wanted was for her to get the impression that the house wasn’t big enough to accommodate her, or somehow discounted her.

  Elaine’s house, irritatingly, was finished. It was also huge. She not only had a World Cup Viewing Room but also enough cupboards in which to store things like tents and fishing nets and table football that modern families seem to acquire, but which we, in future, wouldn’t be allowed. Every time my family went out – there was a very useful music class on Saturday mornings – I surreptitiously threw away things I thought they wouldn’t miss.