The Handmade House Read online

  We shifted our behaviour in other ways in deference to the house: brought in the white mugs, took off our shoes at the front door in wet weather. But ecopoeisis isn’t, presumably, an entirely one-way process, and we also waited to see how the house would wrap itself around us.

  In the past, putting up pictures had been one of the principal and most urgent ways in which I laid claim to any new place. This time we didn’t do it. There was, admittedly, a practical consideration: hanging things on the concrete walls would have meant puncturing them, so it seemed pretty important to be sure they were the right things. What we really needed, I kept saying wistfully to Charlie, was a Chris Offili. Needless to say, we didn’t have a Chris Offili or any prospect of affording one. But there was also a sense of not wanting to rush in, heedlessly imposing ourselves. We’ll probably put up some art some day. But for the time being, we’re happy to look at the multi-hued, light-shifting concrete.

  As any three-year-old exposed to the tale of the three little pigs could tell you, houses are supposed to last, which means that any judgement of them at the moment of move-in is bound to be partial and suspect. The real test of a building’s success is what it is like to inhabit, not just for the first few weeks, but over years. This was a house that had been built for us, around us, but on the basis of a view of us that was, at best, a snapshot. We were already a different family – both, I liked to think, more diffuse and more close-knit – to the one which had started out on this project. The real test of the house would be whether it could absorb our changes – children leaving and coming back, everyone getting older, maybe grandchildren eventually, perhaps even (though it looked improbable) a time when we weren’t working flat out to pay off the mortgage. The few magazine architecture moments we’d had, the house apparently suspended in a state of poised perfection, had been gratifying, but they weren’t what living here was really all about. ‘The art of living in its entirety – that is, the art of loving and dreaming, of suffering and dying – makes each life unique,’ Stewart Brand has written. ‘Therefore, the Cartesian, three-dimensional space into which the architect builds and the vernacular space which dwelling brings into existence, constitute different classes of space.’ We could only hope that the two things would slowly come together.

  It took us more than a year to get anywhere close to straight financially: cheques were still bouncing in November. I often wondered whether we might have done things differently: avoided coming so close to financial meltdown, got the builders to move faster; whether we’d actually learnt anything from our three years of house-building.

  In retrospect, we probably should have trusted Joyce more, because she’d invariably been right. At the same time, I had a paradoxical sense that we should somehow have stayed more on top of the project. Much of the time, I felt I’d been in a miasma – about timings, money, what kind of a building we were getting, why we were doing it. But to have been more on top of it would have entailed a more confrontational, combative relationship with Joyce. Charlie and I don’t really work like that (not least because we’re not much good at it). And I’m not sure that in the end we would have ended up any happier. The builders overran, but that’s what builders do. And Joyce delivered the house at a budget of £540,000. A year on, that feels like a bargain.

  That autumn, Joyce, told us she was leaving Azman Owens, and the country, and going back to Florida. It felt like very bad timing: we’d only just stopped being her clients and started being her friends and, as a friend, she was confiding and funny, mischievous, interesting, energetic. In reality, of course, her timing was extremely good: she’d been wanting to leave for ages and had only hung on so long to see the house through to completion. (Her mother had been calling at least once a month for the past year to find out if she was ready to come back, and Joyce would plaintively reply that she still had to finish the concrete house. I think it’s fair to say that when her mother eventually saw it, she couldn’t quite grasp what all the fuss had been about.) We were almost the last people to know she was leaving, because she hadn’t wanted to add to our anxiety.

  But it also felt like bad timing professionally. The house had won awards and received lots of publicity and the firm seemed to be moving up a gear. Ferhan was busier than ever and expanding, yet it looked like we’d now be the only people ever to have an Azman Owens new-build. Joyce, though, had been divorced for several years and she was wearied by being a single parent so far from home. She had a huge, close family in Florida and they wanted her back.

  I miss her, though. Every time the photograph on the piano gets pushed to the middle, I think about the architecture police. Sometimes I nudge it along, as Joyce would have done. Sometimes, subversively, I leave it where it is.

  The pain, like childbirth, receded. That summer, on holiday on the Mizen peninsula in south-west Ireland, we saw a remarkable amount of property for sale: down every other lane, some old barn or shack ripe for development.

  ‘What I’d really like,’ Charlie said idly one day as we were bowling along in the car to the beach, ‘would be to build a house against a hillside, with views over the sea.’

  I stared at him incredulously, this man who’d said never, never again: no more moving, not even any bathroom renovations.

  ‘Glass at the front and slate behind…’

  ‘I thought you never wanted to speak to a builder again.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Charlie said. ‘I think we’ve got one more house left in us.’ He slowed the car so he could look at me and smile. ‘I think you think so too.’

  Acknowledgements

  With thanks to: Juliet Annan, Ferhan Azman, Elaine Bedell, David Bennett, Brian Eckersley, Georgia Garrett, Lux Patel, Joyce Owens and Meg Rosoff.

  I am also indebted to writing by: Christopher Alexander, Gaston Bachelard, David Bennett, Stewart Brand, Clare Cooper Marcus, H. B. Cresswell, Carl Elliott, Suzanne Frank, Joel Garreau, Sarah Gaventa, Joyce Henri Robinson, Robert Hughes, Herbert and Katherine Jacobs, Philip Jodidio, Tracy Kidder, Henri Lefebvre, Kevin McCloud, Grant McCracken, Clare Melhuish, Michael Pollan, Christopher Reed, Witold Rybczynski, Richard Sennett, Catherine Slessor and Tom Wolfe.