The Handmade House Page 6

  Eventually, once her father started letting her bring the elderly neighbour home, she dumped him and caught up with most of her work, but not enough to secure the university place she should have had. And then she seemed to have had some sort of existential upset with the application form. ‘I ticked economics. And chemistry, because by then I was seeing a younger friend of my father’s who was studying chemistry at Ankara. And I put architecture in there, but it got mixed up because of some rubbing out and I didn’t even apply to the best architecture school.’

  Accepted on to the architecture course (the inferior one), she hated it and almost dropped out. After a lot of persuasion, her father convinced her to stay on in Istanbul and apply herself to architecture, instead of merely to boyfriends. She engineered a switch to the school she should have applied for in the first place, where she started coming top of her class.

  Joyce and Ferhan’s story is not one of single-minded ambition and willed destiny. It isn’t, in other words, a man’s story. They weren’t in Britain because Britain is a particularly good place for architects to be; they ended up here for the reason that women have traditionally ended up anywhere: men. Joyce had spent a year in Rome as part of her degree, where she not only discovered Scarpa, but also another, English, architect, Bill, whom she subsequently married.

  Ferhan was offered a job in her professor’s practice after university. Three years later, she was asked to do some speculative drawings for a project his son was working on with an English property developer called Erik Pagano. Ferhan went for a drink with Erik, fell in love, and married him.

  By 1988, Ferhan was in London and working for a big commercial architecture practice that specialized in multi-millionpound projects and had a staff of 120. One of the 120 was an American woman, open and easy-going and always laughing, and Ferhan says she thought, ‘I’ll be friends with this woman: she’s fun.’ She and Joyce knew almost nothing about each other’s architecture because they never worked on anything together and, in any case, the work they were doing was all detail, joining the dots of someone else’s designs, and left no room for individuality. Joyce hated it; she went back to Florida. Her entire family (she has four brothers) had decamped to the state from Chicago, and life was easier for her there than in Britain. She found interesting work with a very good practice. But Ferhan wouldn’t stop pestering her. ‘She kept calling, saying “Come back, come back,” and endless letters – I mean, these days who writes letters?’

  Luckily for Ferhan, Bill didn’t like Florida. He couldn’t settle. Quite soon, he realized he had no desire at all to live in America. Joyce’s prospects, on the other hand, were better than ever; she had offers of work coming in from all over the country. But when Ferhan was headhunted by an expanding practice in London and wrote yet another letter demanding that Joyce come and join her, Joyce caved in to the pressure and decided that she might as well. Almost immediately, she and Ferhan started working on side projects of their own in their spare time.

  ‘What, you went into business without knowing anything about each other’s architecture?’ I asked them incredulously, much later.

  ‘We sort of did,’ said Ferhan.

  ‘We did, sort of,’ said Joyce.

  This meant getting up at 7 a.m. and cycling into the little office they’d rented from a woman Ferhan had met at the gym. ‘Then we would run, literally run, to be at our desks by nine. Then at lunchtime, we would leave separately, five minutes apart, and run round to our office again.’

  ‘We were stupid,’ Ferhan says now. ‘Why would anyone care what we did?’

  The office was tiny and airless; what with their bicycles and the gas fire, ‘We couldn’t move without hitting each other on the shins.’ One day Joyce smelled smoke. Ferhan said that was OK, she was smoking, which she was, but mainly because she’d caught fire.

  They won a competition, prompting the owners of the restaurant Kensington Place to ask them to look at designing a brasserie on the other side of Kensington High Street. They answered an ad in Loot for a new office; when they said they were architects, the landlord said, ‘Oh good, I need some architects,’ and got them to work on designs for a nightclub. Then came projects that were actually built: a friend of Ferhan’s virtually ordered her old boyfriend to use them on the refurbishment of his Georgian house. He made so much money doing it up and selling it that he bought a flat on several vast floors behind Upper Street and employed them again. Joyce, meanwhile, rented a house in Waterloo, where she met the owner of the bakery Konditor and Cook, for whom she and Ferhan have subsequently designed three sleek shops. Isabella Blow was another neighbour: they did her house; that led to a commission for Alexander McQueen’s shop off Bond Street. By the time we met them, they had worked for photographers, hairdressers, designers and the editor of the Spectator, later the Conservative MP for Henley, Boris Johnson. (They were always winding us up about who would need more metres of bookshelves, us or the Johnsons. In the end we had 65 metres, to, I believe, the Johnsons’ 68. But I like to think that we let them win, and that we are just more discriminating about getting rid of stuff that we’re never going to read again.)

  They had, in other words, some stylish, interesting and diverse clients. But they were still largely unknown. If you’re going to go to all the bother of building a house, you’d imagine that you’d want to employ the best, most exciting architect you can afford: you’re not, presumably, looking for something pedestrian. Joyce and Ferhan had some photographs of what they’d done, but architectural photographs only give a limited, glossed-up sense of what it’s like to inhabit a space. They hadn’t won any prizes for their work, or been much written up in the architectural press. And even if we’d asked them (which we didn’t), I don’t think we’d have got much sense of their thoughts about buildings because they don’t articulate architecture, they just do it. They actively dislike what they call intellectualizing architects.

  They do, obviously, have a style, which is rooted in modernism, is pared down without being rigidly minimalist, relies on the use of a limited palette of materials on any particular project, and employs certain tricks, or devices – surfaces that move from inside to out, benches. (I don’t think they’ve ever done a project that hasn’t ended up with at least two benches. We have four.) But I’ve only worked this out for myself over time. I don’t think they would ever say it themselves, for fear it might limit them. They talk – both of them – as if talk might be rationed tomorrow, but words aren’t really their medium, they’re not how they think.

  So they were an unknown quantity. Yet we were expecting them to understand us, to translate us into materials, to body us forth in all our complex emotions and diffidences and enthusiasms. We trusted them to build a house that we would love. Looking back, I think we were mad.

  The weekend after we secured the land, we decided we should have a celebration, so we invited Joyce and Ferhan to the land for champagne, plus Hugo and Sue, who had introduced them to us, and Elaine and Clive, who had offered to give us their house, and everybody’s children. Our family drove to the land en route from Freddie’s school open day, and the car was full of stuff he’d been keeping there and was bringing home for the summer. Sometime before we arrived, I squeezed myself in amongst this junk to feed Ned a pot of something or other for his tea. (I’d like to say this was homemade, softly sweated carrots perhaps, tenderly pressed through a sieve, but he was my fourth child so it would have come out of a jar. Henrietta, on the other hand, had no jars in her infancy but so many sieved organic carrots that she contracted something called carotene anaemia, which turned her yellow, like an ageing roué with hepatitis.)

  We parked in the private road, risking the clampers. I was trying to pass Freddie’s trainers to him in the front, unhook Ned from his car seat, avoid getting the food that was down his front down mine and climb down from the people carrier, when I somehow dislodged the lid from the plastic tank at my feet. The plastic tank contained a praying mantis, although not for long, s
ince it saw its opportunity and lunged for freedom. Seeing that it was about to escape, I shoved the lid back on, hard.

  There was a distinct crunching sound. I looked down. Half the mantis was inside the tank. The other part was hanging at an awkward angle over the edge. Instinctively, even while gasping at the awfulness of what had happened, I lifted the lid a fraction and surreptitiously tried to shove the dangling portion of mantis back inside.

  ‘What are you trying to do?’ asked Freddie, aghast at the sight of me fumbling with his decimated pet.

  I looked up at him numbly.

  ‘Were you trying to put it back in the tank?’ he wailed. ‘When you’d killed it? How could you?’ He gazed at his squashed mantis. ‘When I’ve been looking after that for months? When it’s doubled in size!’

  I was mortified. How could I? What kind of mother was I, to kill my son’s pet? I wanted to say that I’d replace it, but knew instinctively that this would be a bad offer at that moment. Freddie, still in his stage makeup from Excerpts from the Pirates of Penzance, and already 5 foot 8, stood weeping inconsolably in the street. There was champagne on ice in the boot and, over the wall, half a dozen people waiting to celebrate.

  ‘I’m sorry, Freddie,’ I said again, helplessly. ‘It was an accident.’

  ‘Oh,’ Freddie sniffed, ‘so you didn’t do it deliberately?’

  ‘Mum, how could you?’ said Henrietta, turning up at that point with her boyfriend, Matthew.

  ‘It’s not even dead!’ Freddie wailed, inspecting it more closely. ‘You’ve cut its legs off! It’s only in agony!’

  Freddie carried the mantis mournfully on to the land and crushed it (although I have since read that mantids can regrow legs, so we may have been too hasty. They are surprisingly robust for animals with so many thin bits. Insects generally are alarmingly tough. Later that year, one of Freddie’s stick insects escaped from another tank in his bedroom and was presumed killed by the cat until, months later, it leapt from the curtains on to a child’s pillow during a sleepover).

  ‘It’s like the whatsit farmers in Ghana, or somewhere,’ I said half an hour later, trailing across the grass to where Freddie was still communing with his squashed insect. (I was slightly drunk.) ‘Nabdam. When they want to build, they invite their friends and family round to the site and kill a chicken and throw it on the site, and if it dies with its beak in the air, it’s a sign the ancestors approve.’

  ‘Yeah? Well, my mantis was facing downwards. One half inside the tank, one half outside.’

  So if we’d been Nabdam farmers and the mantis had been a chicken, we would have had to find another site. It’s important that the ancestors approve.

  And when I was less upset, and less drunk, that didn’t seem to me such an unreliable way of looking at things. What, for example, about the people who’d lived in the building on our site that had been bombed (did it take a direct hit? Were they in it at the time?): mightn’t they have wanted to know how it was changing, what plans we had for it? Memories are mixed up with, embedded in places: the streets of Hackney Wick in which my parents and my aunts and uncles grew up were knocked down in the postwar slum clearances to make way for tower blocks and motorway extensions, flyovers and dual carriageways. But they still – those of them who are alive – like to go back and trace the patterns of the streets under the concrete, to recollect their childhoods. The places reassure us that the experiences were real and not imagined, just as novels in which a sense of place is powerful rarely feel untruthful.

  The time that I feel most furious that my father is dead is when I pass the little alleyway in Clerkenwell where his office used to be (which, in fact, I do very often, as it’s on the way to Harry’s school). In his day, the area was full of businesses like his, where bits of electrical equipment, or perhaps clocks and watches, were taken apart and put back together by men in brown coats. The windows were grimy, often barred; even the shops – grim stationers selling manila envelopes out of dusty boxes – seemed to turn their backs to the street. You had to walk half a mile to get a sandwich made of limp bread and margarine, filled with something that had been sitting too long in a metal tub and was congealed on the surface.

  Now there’s a Pizza Express on one corner of his alley and a Prêt à Manger on the other, with a Starbucks next door. I wonder what he would have made of this: if it would have amused him that Clerkenwell, of all places, has become a young persons’ place, its factories littered with expensive lofts, or if it would have made him say something sceptical – he was generally inclined to scepticism – about the predictability, the shiny uniformity, of the changes brought about by globalization. I can scarcely pass the alleyway without giving the thought a glancing nod, and, in that sense, he haunts the place.

  The land was looking smaller each time we visited. Possibly literally: someone had hammered wooden posts into the ground a couple of feet in from where we thought our boundary should be (i.e. where the estate agents had said it would be, and where the garden got scrubby, which also happened to line up with the boundary of the properties next door. There were, to make the whole thing clearer, a couple of concrete posts on this line, which we assumed must be the remains of some previous wall)

  ‘Well, I hope they’re not meant to represent some kind of boundary,’ I said, cheerfully, loping around them with my champagne glass.

  ‘Nah,’ said my sister. ‘How could they be? They don’t line up with next door. Anyway, your land is the unkempt bit.’ She lowered her voice. ‘Are your architects lesbians?’

  ‘Elaine, they’re business partners. And they’ve got three children here between them.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean anything.’

  ‘You just think they’re lesbians because it’s unusual for women to be architects and set up a practice together. That’s incredibly sexist. Do people think you’re a lesbian because you run a successful production company?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter, of course,’ said my sister infuriatingly. ‘But I bet you they are.’

  Before we left for a week’s holiday, I asked our solicitor to investigate the sudden appearance of the posts (which, when I was sober, were somehow more worrying). We set up a meeting with Joyce and Ferhan for when we returned; in the meantime, they would arrange a site and soil survey. If we’d been sensible, we would have done this before we paid much too much for the land: what if it contained an old toxic waste dump? A new toxic waste dump? High concentrations of radon gas? Killer cables?

  Across the lane was another site, already sold when we first saw our plot – again, for what seemed like a ridiculous amount of money, since it was smaller than ours and an even less promising shape. Work had already started when we first saw it – pilings had gone in – and then abruptly stopped. We were told that a workman wielding an electric drill had gone straight through a major electricity cable and been thrown to the other side of the site. He was lucky not to have been killed. When I eventually met the owner, an architect who was building for himself (over, it would turn out, many years), he told me that if he’d known that he was putting his house on top of an electricity substation, he wouldn’t have bought the land. His house is still not finished.

  But he hadn’t had time to investigate properly, and neither had we; our site and soil surveys together cost £2,831.70 and I’m not sure we would have wanted to spend that on a hope. Now, though, we owned the hope, and had to.

  The last thing I did before we went away was send Joyce and Ferhan a brief. This called, effectively, for a tardis:

  5–6 bedrooms

  kitchen/breakfast/family room

  2 studies – one that we could have a bed in?

  2 bathrooms

  utility room

  shower room

  As well as this, I put down:

  Masses of light

  Lots of glass

  Limestone floors

  Then I elaborated some random thoughts:

  The kitchen to be the largest room and heart of the house: the ro
om we will really live in. Facing on to/integrated with the garden. We will always eat here – the dining part ideally next to the garden. The kids will probably spend most of their time playing here.

  Reception room – another place where people can go to watch television/play music/talk to friends. Not forbidding but not a den either.

  Henrietta’s bedroom – to fit a double bed

  Freddie’s bedroom

  Harry and Ned’s bedroom/s – should they be together or apart? Will there be any space for the boys to play other than the kitchen/ family area?

  Need lots of storage space – for toys, camping equipment, bicycles, scooters, roller blades, etc., clothes

  Should we consider an L-shape – with studies/adult bedrooms on one wing? [Charlie put that in; I thought it was getting above ourselves to suggest what shape it should be. But he had a point about getting away from the children, so I left it.]

  Geraldine wants to garden, so light into the garden is a consideration: we don’t want to block out the sunshine.

  Geraldine’s study – doesn’t have to be large.

  I don’t know why I put that last bit in, unless as an acknowledgement that we were asking rather a lot of a small (and shrinking) site, and perhaps because I am my mother’s daughter. My mother, when asked over for dinner, will say: ‘Don’t worry about me: I’ll be happy with a few scraps.’