The Handmade House Page 8

  So the little geyser of significance stayed there: a choice flunked beside the cheese and pineapple, perhaps because it appeared to be too momentous, and quite definitely set us up for something slightly different than if we’d known each other for ages and somehow, almost accidentally, drifted into a relationship.

  For the house, on the other hand, there was no defining moment, no hoarded, scary revelation. None of it seemed real. We drifted through that summer in a haze of ‘Let’s pretend’ as Joyce and Ferhan progressively revealed plans for a house that might well never be built, partly because it was unimaginably unlike a house (an indoor/outdoor eating space: what was that?); but mainly because the planners had said they didn’t want this kind of a building.

  Every fortnight to three weeks, from the beginning of July to the middle of October, Charlie and I would drive from home to Islington, or meet on the corner of the alleyway where Joyce and Ferhan had their offices, climb the stairs to their eyrie and sit in the meeting space between the cupboard and the white wall, drinking coffee out of white cups served on a black tile. In my awe at the pristine control they exerted over their surroundings, this meeting area seemed ineffably sophisticated, although I now realize it was in fact a rather narrow space between a cupboard and a wall.

  The mugs were always white, whereas at home we had mugs with pictures on them. One or two of them might even have been chipped. Presumably, if you had a Joyce and Ferhan house you were supposed to have Joyce and Ferhan mugs too, and this seemed more absurd to me than courtyard bathroom and glass walls. I had very little grasp of what these might be like. But mugs I understood, and we had a lot of crap ones. We were just playing at being people who had architecture.

  But that in itself seemed worth the money. (Well, perhaps not quite the money we were spending, but something.) There’s a lot to be said for playing at things – especially when you’re an adult, especially, perhaps, when you’re a female adult. I always like and warm to playfulness in other people – which is not quite the same thing as wit, though they often go together, or flirting, though flirting can be playfulness-with-intent. Not all children are playful, although they’re more so, generally speaking, than adults. I like playfulness in myself, and in other people, and especially in people who bring it out in me, because it can be hard to access, what with getting older and having children and jobs. The ability to be playful seems to require generosity and a kind of self-forgetfulness, a readiness to take oneself not too seriously, which nevertheless remembers that people together can be more amusing than people alone; it’s more a matter of demeanour than any specific activity. (Men in sheds are on the whole not playful.) Anyway, whatever it is, I felt we were getting a lot of it that summer. It was easy to feel that we were playing with Joyce and Ferhan, because they were always laughing, and because we were engaged in a kind of game. As Witold Rybczynski has pointed out, much of the satisfaction of architecture arises from ‘the rules, the smallness, the fantasy of making space, the re-creation of childhood freedom’.

  I spend most of my childhood pretending to be someone else, some kind of a princess usually, for the simple reason that frankly it was much easier being an Anglo-Saxon warrior queen or a girl-pirate-captain-cunningly-disguised-as-a-man than it was being me. There’s a limit to how much you’re allowed to do that as an adult. I spend quite a lot of time pretending to be a journalist; I go through the motions of being a mother, intermittently experiencing flashes of existential hilarity. The only time I can convincingly pretend to be someone else these days is when I’m ironing, and, for other reasons, I avoid doing a great deal of that. But being a client was a bit like being a cunningly disguised pirate queen: what if I were the sort of person who drifted around in Armani, drinking out of white mugs, what would my house look like then? Oh, like this, apparently. And it followed that if you had a house like that, how could you not be chic and poised?

  Of my four children, the one who most resembles me in this respect is Freddie, also a child who seemed to feel in need of transformation, who was for ever dressing up or constructing elaborate Lego models in which good and bad were clearer and heroism came naturally. When Freddie became a teenager, when the dressing-up was no longer wholly appropriate and his younger brothers were only interested in having Lego demonstrations for a limited number of hours a week, he transferred his interest from little buildings made of plastic bricks to full-sized ones. He wanted to go to New York. I took him on a bonding trip when he was fifteen, expecting he would want to shop. But, mainly, he wanted to look up.

  The word ‘architect’ derives from the Greek architekton, or head carpenter, while the Sanskrit and Chinese words for an architect – sthapati and chientsu-shu – both translate literally as ‘master builder’. Frank Gehry, architect of the Bilbao Guggenheim, has said that his choice of career was influenced by spending much of his childhood playing with construction toys. The inventor of Lego, Ole Kirk Christensen, was a joiner, and Lincoln Logs, a sort of American Lego, were developed by John Lloyd Wright, son of the architect. Friedrich Froebel, arguably the inventor of custom-made, commercially available children’s building blocks, began training as an architect before getting diverted into education, and introduced his blocks in 1837 as part of his Nine Gifts, a series of play materials of increasing complexity designed for use in the kindergarten, supplying a little song that children could sing as they piled his educative bricks on top of one another:

  A house, a house, a house!

  A house belongs to me.

  A house, a house, a house,

  Come here, come and see!

  The lyrics could maybe do with some work, but the jaunty rhythms are about right for the little spritzes of excitement we felt as we sat across the table from Joyce and Ferhan and they turned over their big sheets of paper and we gazed at them, trying to read what they’d changed before they told us, to work out how much our lives were about to improve.

  The use of A2 sheets of paper for the presentation of architectural plans is clever because, on A2, everything looks big. But not too big: the whole conception is simultaneously reduced to neatness and comprehensibility. Buildings appear either in plan – from overhead – or in section, in a slice from the side; and, unlike real-life structures, these formal shapes can’t get out of hand. Not being three-dimensional, they don’t acquire nuisance places at the back of cupboards containing cardboard boxes that you should really go through and chuck stuff out of. The drawings imposed order on the untidiness of our lives, on our family of trailing children, our toddlers and teenagers, who, from their point of view, half-belonged somewhere else, but from ours, wholly belonged with us. But more than merely imposing order, they were order. The process took on its own life; the game imposed its own rules. What we were doing at this stage with pencils and tracing paper had its own justification: the making of coherent plans. I couldn’t envisage a finished building and it didn’t bother me, because I had all these nice neat drawings.

  Watching the building take shape on paper was rather like seeing fireworks go off: dazzled by the display, we were unable to focus on every streak of colour, every spark of light. We must have been frustrating: we’d fix on some passing twinkly thing we could grasp, but which was at this stage largely irrelevant, like whether we could have a bath in which we might sit up to read. And then we’d ignore much more fundamental questions, such as whether it was really a good idea to have Henrietta’s bedroom next to the kitchen and garden, so creating potential for endless rows when the boys got up early and rode their tricycles along the terrace, right next to her bed, or even just ate their Rice Krispies noisily. I had a frequent sense that I was not only missing the wood for the trees, but also that I didn’t know what kind of forested area I was looking for in the first place. I’d thought a lot about the interior design of existing spaces – how to make the through-room of a Victorian terrace look less like a corridor, where to put a sofa in a multi-purpose basement – but I’d never before had to consider making spaces out
of nothing, and it was slightly brain-hurting, like thinking about that branch of physics that proposes parallel lives.

  Ever since the concept meeting, I’d been walking around thinking happily of my spectacular hall with its glass walls giving on to vistas of bamboo and sky, which was more or less the only part of the plan I’d been able to get my head round properly. By the first proper design meeting, the hall and associated vistas had gone. The shape of the house had changed. Instead of a rectangle, it was now more of a Z-shape, although Joyce and Ferhan described it, in more elegant architecture-speak, as two interlocking cubes. It was as if someone had pushed the top end, by the lane, hard up against the mews, and the bottom end the other way, into the garden. You might think a moderately sentient client would ask why they had decided to do this. And perhaps we did.

  But clients asking difficult questions are only a help to architects when they have yet to realize a mistake, rather than when they’ve already rectified it, and they must have given an answer so abstruse or distracting that we immediately forgot it again. They weren’t about to start parading their errors, even though architecture is inevitably a process, and architects do spot better ways to do things all the time; sometimes they realize – or are told by the structural engineer – that something they’ve suggested would, in real life, fall down. But they like to retain an air of working-by-mystique rather than working-by-mistake. They prefer a pliant client, who doesn’t probe the process too much, and I assume they learn how to turn you into one at architecture school. Joyce and Ferhan’s favoured method was to flourish a revised plan, giving some vague justification for it (‘We thought this would be better’) and then setting off a lightning flare – in this case, that they would be moving the den out of the kitchen so that Harry could play his Nintendo 64 without directly interfering with The Archers. This was such an obvious improvement, requiring so much discussion, that it blinded us to the fact that the new plan created an area of garden in the north-east of the plot that would only ever be any good for slugs.

  Later, when the existence of the slug garden perplexed me, I assumed it must have been imposed on us by the Planning Officer. In his initial discussions with Joyce and Ferhan, he must have said something about the need to respect the rear line of the mews, or that the Planning Department couldn’t recommend approval of a glass wall that would allow us to look down on people sunbathing in the garden next door every time we climbed the stairs. (Next door was the back garden of something called the Foreign Missions Club, a guest-house for missionaries visiting London from foreign places. You might imagine that missionaries would have their minds on higher things than sunbathing, and also that they would get quite enough sun wherever their missions were, but that would be wrong.) In reality, I think, Joyce and Ferhan changed the floor plan because they simply couldn’t get enough rooms into the one they’d first thought of. As for the hall, it might not now have a glass wall, on account of there being a den and a bathroom on the other side of it – but, they assured me, it could still be spectacular, especially if we left the sitting room at the other end of it open to the skylight.

  ‘What, like not have a ceiling?’ I asked.

  ‘Not at one end of it. You’d have a void there. It would be very dramatic.’

  Joyce and Ferhan’s children were all at primary school. They had no idea what it was like to have teenagers who come in at midnight. So we explained to them about children reaching an age at which they talk and sleep at the wrong ends of the day, and they agreed to look at getting rid of the void over the sitting room. Then they explained the indoor/outdoor living space, which would be protected by a sliding metal grille, which seemed to me, not an especially hardy person, not very much protection at all. Still, no one else would have one. We would be marked out as radical and experimental people when we had friends and acquaintances round to dinner; and we could always warn them to bring jumpers.

  I tried to describe the plans to my mother – at this stage we still weren’t taking the A2 sheets out of Joyce and Ferhan’s lovely meeting cupboard. ‘What, so you’re going to have a flat roof?’ she asked doubtfully. ‘Aren’t you worried about leaking?’ (Perhaps she had a point here: the first owner of Fallingwater, Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterpiece, described it as a ten-bucket building.) Her other main piece of advice was to have somewhere by the front door to put coats and boots – prompted, I expect, by distaste for our current habit of accumulating coats over the end of the banister in a big pile until someone was coming round, when we would finally distribute them around the bedrooms. ‘We must have somewhere to put coats,’ I said to Joyce and Ferhan at the next meeting. ‘We were always planning it,’ they said. But the meeting after, it appeared. I was always sceptical about the studies on the roof, which stuck up like a kind of funnel, giving the house the appearance of an ocean liner, which I don’t think was the effect Joyce and Ferhan were striving after at all. (Had they been postmodernists, a house that looked like an ocean liner would have been thrilling, but they weren’t.) Besides, the studies effectively added an extra half-storey, which would mean either that our house would poke above the roofline proposed for the developer’s houses or be required to have very low ceilings. It was already obvious that Freddie was going to be tall, and Henrietta’s boyfriend Matthew was 6 foot 4: I envisaged grandchildren who thought of us as quaint figures out of history, like medievals, living behind doors that you had to stoop to get through.

  It quickly became clear that building-control regulations meant that we’d need all sorts of ugly, heavy fire doors if we wanted these studies on the roof. So Joyce and Ferhan moved them elsewhere. ‘Those studies on the roof never looked as though Joyce and Ferhan had considered them properly,’ Charlie said to me thoughtfully once they’d disappeared, but – and this was typical of the way the process worked – not until then, because there were always too many other things to preoccupy us.

  Charlie’s study went out to the back of the garage, becoming a kind of shed at the bottom of the garden, although on the plans it was labelled ‘second car space’, because Joyce and Ferhan didn’t want to alarm the planners by calling it ‘office’, thus giving the impression that Charlie was going to run some sort of car repair business out there, or an establishment involving the heavy use of drills (rather than, as in reality, the heavy use of pencils). My study was at the end of the upstairs hall, but didn’t seem to have a door. The trouble was that even with the new interlocking cube arrangement, it was difficult to fit everything in. It was like one of those Christmas cracker puzzles with letters on a square of plastic that you have to push into the right order: you displaced one thing and it created problems somewhere else. The process was in this sense quite unlike a refurbishment, where you already have experience of inhabiting the space and there are certain known quantities. Not only was there a lot of information to absorb at every meeting (information that we were untutored to process) but the house looked so far away from any place I’d ever lived in that I didn’t know how we would live in it, what preferences we could possibly have.

  Le Corbusier once claimed that he sought, in his architecture, to exalt what he called the ‘White World’, which he explained as pure, streamlined, calming, with exact proportions and precise materials, over the ‘Brown World’ of clutter and compromise, which the art critic Robert Hughes sums up as ‘the architecture of inattentive experience’. There was a part of me that believed, and certainly wanted to, that I was up to living in a White World, even though my world at present was exhaustively inattentive, indubitably brown.

  For many reasons, I couldn’t have embarked on this project without Charlie (money, most obviously, but also because, without him, I doubt I could ever have taken myself so seriously over such a long period of time). But he was also much more instinctively modernist than I was. When we first met, Charlie’s house had, to my mind, shockingly little furniture. There was a single black sofa against the wall, a desk, and a low table supporting a small television. In this arrangem
ent, his portable typewriter took on the appearance (quite appropriately, in fact) of a major item. There were bare boards everywhere and, for some reason that was incomprehensible to me, he had removed all the internal doors. The feng shui of this was, to me, terrible: you felt someone was going to walk in on you from round the corner at any moment. Which of course they weren’t, because Charlie lived alone. But I wasn’t used to that either. I was used to people barging in and dropping half a toy before wandering out again. I was used to a house littered with half-toys that I was too distracted, too plain exhausted, to pick up, let alone to hunt down their corresponding halves. Even my car was messy, with old drinks cartons dropped under the seats and books left behind from long journeys and sweets trodden into the carpeting. My house stood no chance.

  I was less exhausted these days: there was something about living with Charlie that was energizing, so that I no longer looked at untidiness and felt hotly, furiously resentful and then defeated, on the verge of tears and overcome by the impossibility of imposing myself. Now I looked at mess more like normal people, and thought less hysterical, more normal thoughts, such as ‘Oh fuck, better pick that up sometime.’ But even living with Charlie hadn’t made the children any less prone to leaving toys in the wrong room or kicking vital components of games under sofas. There was always cleaning to be done, tidying that could be done better. I was the daughter of a clever, just pre-Betty Friedan woman who found it hard to understand how her life had become about tidying up spaces only so that people who didn’t take her seriously (i.e. us) could untidy them again. Torn between her love of order and her loathing of a role into which she had been forced, my mother retaliated in the only way open to her (since she loved my father): by suggesting to her daughters, never overtly but in a million tiny ways, that it was preferable to get a job and pay someone else to do your cleaning. That it was better not to care about it quite so much, not to think like she did.