The Handmade House Read online

  Anyway, luckily for me, I live with someone who has entirely healthy levels of self-belief, which he generously spills and splashes, like a fashionably brimming swimming pool, on to the people around him – children, colleagues, me – so we hadn’t given up.

  The worst thing to have emerged from our solicitor’s search was that nobody knew who owned the lane. The council had never adopted it, which explained why it was so pitted and full of puddles and why there wasn’t a sign at the end to tell you it was there. But roads of unknown provenance are a fairly common occurrence, and there’s a standard procedure. You take out what is known as a defective title indemnity, which is an insurance, roughly to the value of the house, against someone’s turning up at some point in the future and refusing to let you cross their land to get to your front door.

  The only thing that was holding us up now seemed to be Lloyds’ dilatoriness in sending a surveyor to our current house in Malvern Road. With three days to go we were hassling them to get someone over to us at the rate of roughly once every four hours. After everything, the idea of losing out for being late didn’t bear thinking about. The people who were buying the house behind our plot had close friends who’d bid for the land; I imagined them waiting eagerly for the deadline to expire so they could slip back in with their ready cash. As usual, I was over-reacting to authority figures (what does this say about me, that I am capable of seeing estate agents as authority figures?). In reality, I dare say the time limit was imposed mainly to find out whether we were serious before we wasted too much of everyone’s time.

  In the event, we weren’t ready, but neither were the vendors, so the deadline passed without a whisper. They still had to produce something called a statutory declaration of occupation, an abstruse but vital piece of documentation, which I gathered would prove they owned the land and weren’t just squatting on it. They had to get this, I think, from the previous owner, who appeared to be dead.

  In the meantime, they came up with another stipulation. A wall was needed across the garden to separate off our plot. For some reason, we appeared to be the people everyone had decided should organize and pay for this. The couple who were buying the house and the bulk of the garden insisted on having a promise to build this wall included in their contract of sale. The vendors didn’t want to pay for it, so they were making it a condition of sale to us.

  Getting a wall built was fair enough, but I didn’t see why we should have to pay for it. Certainly not all by ourselves. By rights, I pointed out to our solicitor, the vendors should pay, since they were the ones dividing up the land into parcels. So he put this to them, and they refused. OK, I said to the solicitor wearily, in that case we should split the cost with the other buyers, because the wall was for both of us. It was their suggestion, and, until our builders moved on site, it really didn’t matter to us whether they had our nettles or not. So he went back and got the same response. Nothing doing: they wanted a wall of London stock brick, they wanted us to pay for it, and they wanted it inside a month. And they wanted all this to be written into the contract of sale.

  Jan Morris once wrote that she never haggles when she travels, because the amounts involved are invariably less significant to her than to the locals, and because it makes her tense, wastes time she could be spending doing other things, and leaves her with a sour taste in her mouth. There are probably two types of person when it comes to haggling: those who positively relish it as a kind of exercise of emotional and intellectual muscle, and those who basically can’t be arsed. I am in the can’t be arsed camp, which is not a good thing: I have endured sleepless nights in hotel rooms as lifts cranked and creaked up and down the elevator shaft adjoining my bed. My sister – and this may explain why she is a successful businesswoman and I’m not – almost never accepts the first hotel room she is given, more or less on principle.

  But even if I hadn’t been essentially lazy, I was outgunned. The house behind was big and swanky; there was room to build on either side; the garden was wide and long (though obviously not as long as it had been), with mature plants, magnolia and eucalyptus trees and a lawn on which small children might drive plastic tractors and learn to play cricket. Even so, it was not a house to fall in love with. It was 1950s pastiche-classical and looked as though it belonged on a golf course in Surrey with Bruce Forsyth living next door.

  There were always other houses. There were other houses, exactly like this, not so far away, in Chigwell, lived in by blonde women with enough money to re-do their roots every other week (women whom, when I was growing up, I was never entirely sure whether I was supposed to emulate or despise). But there weren’t any other bits of land. Not with planning permission. Not in the place in which, if we’d had to choose, we would have chosen to live. From the vendors’ point of view, the house was both more expensive and less saleable. People were queueing to buy our land and I wasn’t about to lose it because of a wall.

  I made one last attempt to be tough. I called our soon-to-be-neighbour, and said magnanimously that yes, we would pay to build the wall, but as we were making this gesture, sort of out of the goodness of our hearts, perhaps they could make a reciprocal one, and wait until our builders moved on site, which in my estimation would be in about five months, at the end of the year? No chance. He saw my point entirely, of course, that it would be much more expensive to get in separate wall-builders, and it really didn’t matter much to him, but his wife wanted it. And she wanted it within the month. And that was that. I was dealing with a princess.

  So there we were: outflanked and outranked by emotional royalty and faced with the first bill we hadn’t expected: £7,000 for a garden wall, to be found out of current income, which was already under pressure, plugging the gaps left in our loans to buy the land. And we still hadn’t got the extension on our mortgage from Lloyds, because they hadn’t sent round a surveyor. We were three days past our deadline and he was an hour late for his appointment when he finally showed up: a scrofulous figure in stained Hush Puppies, with a grey canvas shoulder bag that looked as though it had been useful around the time of El Alamein, possibly actually at El Alamein, and a shuffling demeanour.

  He had, he explained, got lost. This was not really good news. It meant he didn’t know the area, which, for a surveyor, is like being a runner with no toes.

  London is both socially stratified and not. Compared to most American cities, it’s incredibly mixed, classy squares jostling cheap shopping streets (and nowadays, feeding off them for funkiness, allowing all teenagers to pretend they come from de ghetto). The locals, though, know precisely the point at which each of the classy squares fades into scruffiness; they can calibrate the stage of gentrification of each street, each terrace, with the exactitude of nano-scientists. This insider knowledge is what determines property prices – more, probably, than any other factor, and you probably have to be a native not just of the city but of the district to finesse the trends.

  London Fields, where we lived, is an estate of a dozen or so streets of elegant houses thrown up speculatively in the 1860s to accommodate the growing middle class employed in clerical jobs in the City. The area had been substantially gentrified in the last twenty years, and has a good deal of charm: a number of the roads still had what were known locally as the backlands: overgrown alleyways between the gardens that were originally meant to house the mews, except that the railway had come before they could be built and left them to squirrels, foxes, brambles and trees. But London Fields is bounded on one side by Mare Street, which my parents remember as a well-to-do high street, with good Jewish dress shops where you were served tea as you tried on exquisitely tailored coats, but which has been a dump more or less ever since. Even in the period that has elapsed since mid-2000, when the surveyor came round, Mare Street has had an injection of regeneration monies and acquired a new library, a redeveloped music hall, other arts venues, good Vietnamese restaurants. But at that stage, the library was still operating out of a Portakabin, there were far too many slot-machine
shops and, according to my children, people would issue out of the down-at-heel hairdressers in the evenings to offer stray passers-by (i.e. them) drugs.

  On the other side of London Fields was Kingsland Road, already becoming very fashionable at the bottom end, where it filtered into Hoxton and Shoreditch, and not that bad on Kings-land Waste, closest to us, where there was a Turkish greengrocer who sold honey off an Anatolian mountainside, and Ashok Patel, probably London’s handsomest newsagent. But only a couple of hundred yards up the road lay Dalston Junction, an unpleasant crossroads featuring stalls of shoddy clothes, a hideous mini-mall purveying tat to the sad-eyed asylum seekers from the nearby sweatshops, and shops selling everything-for-a-pound. The traffic seized up here, and you had to walk quickly to avoid being fatally choked by the fumes.

  So if the surveyor had got lost, the chances are it wasn’t in a particularly nice place. He looked nervous, and probably thought he was about to be shot. He wandered around the house and I trailed after him, keeping my distance on account of the bits of him that were flaking off.

  Had we had the house valued before, he wanted to know, so I launched into my explanation about the near-sale and the sealed bids and getting more than the asking price after only a week on the market.

  ‘What’s the area like?’ he asked, in a voice that suggested he was really saying: ‘But that can’t be right: the area’s crap.’

  ‘You should speak to local estate agents,’ I told him. ‘Currells in Islington are good.’

  ‘In Islington?’

  ‘They handle most of the sales round here.’

  ‘What about local estate agents?’

  ‘They are local,’ I said, slightly desperately. ‘Or Holden Matthews. They valued it too. Higher, in fact, than Currells.’ I smiled, apologetically. ‘They’re in Islington, too.’

  He went into another room, then drifted back. ‘How long have you been here?’

  ‘Eight years.’ I paused, considering how eager to appear, then thought, sod it. ‘It’s changed quite a bit in that time. The knock-on effect of Islington, and then Hoxton and Shoreditch.’

  He looked at me blankly, as if these were places he had only dimly heard of and of whose geography he was uncertain, the Burkina Faso and Surinam of North London.

  Charlie reappeared and asked how long he thought it would take to get his report to Lloyds.

  ‘I need to look at other property prices in Hackney. Average prices. And then I’ll write to them.’

  ‘Right,’ I said, not wanting to appear too anxious, ‘but obviously, Hackney is rather varied.’ I meant that he’d better realize this was a nice part.

  ‘I don’t know if they explained,’ Charlie said, ‘but there is some urgency about this …’ We’d just heard we could exchange the following day.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ the surveyor smiled bleakly, in the manner of one both put-upon and disapproving, and shuffled off in a little cloud of dust to the front door.

  Charlie looked at me worriedly. ‘I didn’t like his expression when you told him how much we’d been offered for the house.’

  ‘Maybe he didn’t believe me?’

  ‘Almost as if he thought a house couldn’t sell for that much.’

  ‘Or not this one, anyway.’

  Charlie called Lloyds several times the following morning, because we had an appointment with our solicitor at 2 o’clock to sign the papers for exchange. After all that we’d been through, exchange was now all it was to be. Despite the strictures at the outset, the other side now wanted a couple of days before completion. Still, even we, cavalier as we were, couldn’t exchange without having secured the money.

  The people at the bank promised they were hassling the surveyor and his report would be with them soon. But we should stop worrying: they didn’t anticipate any problem, since from all we’d said the house was worth plenty enough to get the money. They’d get back to us as soon as they had the go-ahead.

  We were at the solicitors’ office on the edge of the City, waiting to go into the meeting room, when the call came through on Charlie’s mobile. We’d got the loan. We could have an extension of £205,000.

  It was £20,000 short of what we needed.

  We’d expected £225,000. We’d hoped for a valuation of £430,000, which was £20,000 less than we’d been offered and had accepted months ago. It meant the surveyor must have valued the house at £400,000.

  Charlie whispered to me to go in with the solicitor ahead of him. He looked grim, and he rarely does this, so it was quite scary. He is one of the most equable people I have ever met: I have never, for example, seen him heated in political discussions; he lays out positions calmly, with detachment, and doesn’t approve of getting aerated about abstractions. But like a lot of calm people, when he flips, it’s frightening, because he flips with force. I sat smiling vaguely at the solicitor and making airy small-talk, as if nothing untoward was happening, while loud shouting could clearly be heard from the ante-room.

  Charlie had called Directory Inquiries, got the surveyor’s number and called him in his office in Southgate. Had he, Charlie demanded, spoken to local estate agents? The surveyor admitted that no, he hadn’t, but he’d looked up property prices in Hackney. Charlie yelled at him that he was incompetent, a disgrace to his profession, that he hadn’t paid any attention at all to the house but had proceeded according to strange and distorted assumptions of his own, and rudely hung up. To compose himself and try to feel better, he envisaged the surveyor in a cobwebby office, surrounded by grey filing cabinets with stiff drawers and old files that no one would ever examine again, the Miss Havisham of chartered surveying.

  Then he returned to the room. Unfortunately, even after the shouting episode, we were still short of £20,000. With a sudden thrill, I realized I had £13,000 in my current account, saved up for tax and VAT. Charlie left the room again, spoke to Lloyds and established that he could get the remaining £7,000 on overdraft. I felt enormously smug: after all the to-ing and fro-ing for money, none of which had had very much to do with me, I had made it all happen. I was crucial.

  (Of course, this is mad, because Charlie and I are married. But this is the warped way you can easily start thinking if you earn less than your partner.)

  At the last minute, another solicitor came into the room to witness the signatures, which was the first indication I’d had that our solicitor wasn’t in fact a solicitor, but a legal executive. But it didn’t seem to matter. He’d done our conveyancing on Malvern Road before this, he’d been quick, and he’d solved the problem of the unadopted lane with the indemnity insurance. We signed and, two days later, we completed.

  On 30 June 2000, we became the owners of a patch of weeds and an enormous amount of debt, including a bridging loan which would cost us £87 for every day we had it.

  3

  We knew very little about Joyce and Ferhan beyond the fact that one was American and the other was Turkish and Hugo had once said something to the effect that what he’d really like to do next was build a house from scratch, and he knew he could do it because he had a great architect. This remark had lodged in my head: possible to build from scratch, have good architect.

  Plus, we liked sitting in Hugo’s kitchen, and there had been the clever plan for the subterranean offices at Malvern Road… but that was pretty much it. We didn’t know how a woman from Chicago and another from Bursa, a town in Turkey we hadn’t heard of, had ended up in Islington, let alone whether they were capable of building a house. They’d never done one before.

  In Grand Designs, the book-of-the-series, Kevin advises, ‘In the first instance, follow Jane and Gavin’s example, and interview several architects.’ You should, he explains, ask them about their history, their other projects, their working methods, which architects have influenced them, their thoughts about buildings.

  Had we done this with Joyce and Ferhan, we might have discovered that Joyce admired a dead architect called Carlo Scarpa, but, given our own ignorance, it wouldn’t have help
ed much. Ferhan might have asked, as she often does: ‘Do you think we’re lesbians? A lot of people think we’re lesbians.’

  Well, no, she probably wouldn’t have, not at a first meeting. But what might we have discovered to persuade us that they were right for us? They were both young mums (so not, apparently, lesbians). Their children went to the same school as Harry, our five-year-old, which I didn’t altogether like: I wanted them to be more radical, more out there than us. (I don’t know where I imagined their children should be educated – some sort of super-creative, innovation-blazing state school that everyone would be clamouring to get into if only they were hip enough to have heard of it, I suppose.) And neither of them had set out to be an architect. Joyce had begun by studying veterinary medicine and flirted with accountancy before taking a drawing course and deciding that sitting with the windows open and listening to music was preferable to fretting over figures or inserting suppositories into farm animals. By her own account, she didn’t particularly distinguish herself at university: ‘I had one professor who said to me, “What are you doing here?” and I said, “I don’t know.” And he said, “You will see: architecture will be your life,” and I just looked at him and thought, “Architecture’s never going to be my life, honey, I got better things to do.”

  Ferhan didn’t spend her childhood looking at buildings and thinking she could single-handedly take architecture into the twenty-first century either. She thought she probably wanted to be an economist or a journalist. Her father was an intellectual – ‘looked like Jean-Luc Godard, smoke curling up in front of him’ – who read Chekhov for her bedtime stories and ran the Cinémathèque in Bursa, so that she was steeped in European cinema and saw Vittorio da Sica’s Bicycle Thieves when she was seven. As it was assumed she would, she won a scholarship to a good school, where all lessons were taught in English: ‘I was brought up by this bunch of intelligentsia and there was nothing to do but go to university and be yourself,’ she says now, ‘so I rebelled when I was sixteen by deciding that I was going to marry the local shopkeeper. He was fifty and a cripple.’ She was with him for eighteen months, and her grades imploded.