The Handmade House Page 9

  Very recently, following some tests in hospital, my mother decided to spend a whole day pampering herself. So she wrote a long letter to a cousin in Australia and did her tax return. ‘You will laugh at me,’ she said, accurately, when she described this day of indulgence, ‘but I couldn’t think of anything nicer than sitting at a desk. I ignored the house and garden. For a whole day!’ It struck me then how effective her childrearing had been, because I often lock on to my desk early in the morning and don’t get up, except to make a cup of coffee, for hours. And also, how bad she is at allowing herself the leeway she wanted for us.

  Unfortunately, to be the focused bluestocking my mother might have been had she not been born in the East End in the first third of the twentieth century, it is better not to care too much what your house looks like. I do still care. Gazza is said to suffer from a syndrome that renders him unable to leave the house until he’s straightened all the towels. This sort of thing occasionally afflicts me, but I am much more troubled by a sort of mirror-image of it: I feel ferociously angry when I come home and the towels aren’t straight, even though I’ve made no attempt – and I know this before I walk in – to straighten them. And for years this troubled me a lot because I employed cleaners who never cleaned very well, or certainly not as well as I believed I could have done if only I could have been bothered. (I also suffered from the unhelpful lack of clarity of the insecure employer in relation to cleaners: I was given to thinking of my grandmother, who had risen at five every morning to travel from her council flat in Stepney to work as an office cleaner in the City, even though these days she would have been registered blind. And my courage failed.)

  So, alternately lured and threatened by Le Corbusier’s White World, I looked up from Joyce and Ferhan’s clean lines on A2 one afternoon in late July and asked, ‘So what about the toys? Where do they all go?’

  Ferhan frowned prettily. ‘We both have a rule in our houses, Joyce and I,’ she announced, the combination of her accent and her energy making any utterance sound like machine-gun fire. ‘Only two toys out at any one time.’

  ‘Only two toys?’

  ‘Two big ones, obviously,’ said Joyce, more emolliently.

  I thought of our basement. The box full of Lego pieces. The other box full of Lego pieces. The box of bits of Playmobil castle. The box of miscellaneous toys: guns, balls, recorders. The old Bahraini cooking pot I still hoped would one day hold a plant, but which was actually full of soft toys. The box of rattles and assorted other baby toys: stacking hoops, shape sorters. The big red fire engine. The children’s books on the windowsill. The latest half-made Lego model, also on the windowsill, which Freddie didn’t want dismantled. Anyone would think they didn’t have bedrooms. But they did, and those were full too.

  And it wasn’t as if I was undisciplined about the toys. Roughly one Saturday morning in three (I spent Saturday mornings doing all the bits of cleaning the cleaner had missed) I’d sort out the toys and throw away any that were irreparable. I had to do this when the children were out at their music class, because if I so much as inched towards a black polythene bag containing a bit of plastic in their presence, it immediately became the most important toy ever.

  So it was inconceivable to me that we could only have two toys out at a time. And then my heart should have sunk, knowing I was incapable of living in a Le Corbusier-style White World. Fortunately, though, it was only a game.

  We thought that a house that was designed around us and our needs was a radical proposition, but in reality it wasn’t radical at all. The things we wanted were deeply predictable, conditioned as much by fashion as individuality. The requirements people have of houses change over time, but are pretty much universal at any given period. In Jane Austen’s day, any self-respecting young woman was in need of a breakfast room, in case of marrying Mr Collins. In the early 1900s, a man might have wanted a smoking room (now available only in an aversion-therapy way in airports) and a billiard room, which disappeared in Britain but mutated in the US into the rec. room in the basement. Then people got more hygienic and wanted bigger bathrooms and more of them, ideally one off every bedroom. All these developments were driven by social imperatives: the American den, or television room, ceased to have a point once televisions spread into bedrooms. Central heating increased the likelihood of family members dispersing to different rooms, especially once they could access pornography on their laptops.

  Right now, families are more different from one another and more fractured than they were a generation or two ago. They are also more self-conscious, resulting in pressures on the one hand for flexibility and on the other for places in the house where people can cohere and feel properly familial, for privacy and community. More people are working at home at least some of the time, and need offices. Children have quantities of toys. Aged parents are becoming more aged, and may need guest rooms, preferably on the ground floor. Childless couples and those with toddlers might like open spaces; parents of teenagers want rooms you can shut off. You may not be able to supply space for all of these things when you start from scratch, but at least you get more chance to think about them rationally.

  But by saying I wanted the kitchen to be the heart of the house, I was being absolutely predictable and dull. I know of no one who has added an extension to their house in the last five years who hasn’t wanted a wall of glass on to the garden, a seamless, indoor/outdoor space as the centre of domestic activity.

  The Victorians, who had a horror of cooking smells, located their kitchens as far away from their living rooms as possible: in a terrace like ours in Hackney, that would have meant in the basement, but in some Victorian country houses the kitchen would have been 150 metres from the dining room, cold food evidently being preferable to the smell of boiled cabbage. Now we’re back to more of a medieval hall arrangement, with everything happening in one room. A kitchen-designer friend of mine, Johnny Grey, says he no longer knows what to call the rooms on which he works, because people don’t want just kitchen in their kitchens any more: they want a playroom, a television room, a place for the sofa, maybe a staircase, certainly somewhere to eat. The idea of sad people gravitating to the kitchen at parties doesn’t make sense any more because there aren’t really any other rooms.

  It has also become more or less compulsory to have lots of glass in kitchens, so that we can pretend we’re cooking in the garden. I don’t know why this is (Delia Smith once did an entire cookery series – Summer Cooking, it must have been – with roses growing out of the back of her fridge, but I don’t think it can have been that), unless it’s true, as Le Corbusier said, that the history of architecture has been ‘the struggle for the window’ and, one way and another, the struggle has now been won. Flying buttresses and Gothic arches were such important architectural innovations because they freed walls to hold more and bigger windows. The mullions and transoms we now find so charming were introduced in response to a practical need to increase the size of the casement at a time when windowpanes were still made by blowing glass bubbles, flattening them out and cutting the biggest square possible from the resulting pancake. The introduction, in the nineteenth century, of sheet glass made with iron rollers changed everything, opening the way eventually (once structural steel made curtain walls possible) for a new conceptual language: it became possible to conceive of a building with a glazed skin, rather than merely glazed openings in a skeleton of brick or stone.

  The property of glass of seeming to dematerialize boundaries must have seemed almost mystical to the modernists, fixated as they were by notions of transparency – whether of construction (so you could see how the building was put together), of function (no ornament for its own sake) or of space (not too many walls). Transparency implied truth and freedom, and glass, with its capacity to make walls seem incorporeal, seemed to offer political possibilities for breaking down the boundaries between human beings and their environment, between one group and another.

  ‘To live in a glass house is a revolution
ary value par excellence,’ wrote the Marxist critic Walter Benjamin. ‘It is also an intoxication, a moral exhibitionism, that we badly need.’ Modernism shared Marxism’s belief that progress is latent in technology, that the machine might help to free people from the slavery it had helped to create. And glass was the way in to Utopia. This filmy material could now clothe the side of buildings, a see-through skin allowing people to engage with the world beyond. Glass was almost an extension of our eyes, another sensitive and pervious membrane. It shone in the sunlight. In 1914, Paul Scheerbart, a German engineer and science fiction writer, proposed in a heady manifesto that the word Fenster might actually fall out of use, as windows gave way to walls of glass: ‘The surface of the earth could change totally if brick buildings were replaced everywhere by glass architecture. It would be as if the Earth clothed itself in jewellery of brilliants and enamel. The splendour is absolutely unimaginable… and then we should have on earth more exquisite things than the gardens of the Arabian Nights. Then we would have a paradise on earth and would not need to gaze yearningly at the paradise in the sky.’

  I wasn’t thinking about any of this when I said I wanted a lot of glass – not even that it was kind of appropriate that Charlie should put his faith in glass given his intellectual background, although this thought did strike me as kind of cute later on. But maybe there is something in what the sociologist Richard Sennett says about the Enlightenment, that it ‘conceived a person’s life opened up to the environment as though one had flung a window open to fresh air’. And this, perhaps, was what we were after, sticking all those sliding doors on the back of our urban houses: openness, an ability to breathe in opportunity and possibility among the canyons and grimy backyards of the city.

  When I first met Charlie, he had a day job as industrial editor of the Financial Times and a night job writing for Marxism Today, an obscure publication that was in thrall to Antonio Gramsci and preternaturally keen on an (also obscure) politician called Tony Blair. He (Charlie, not Tony, disappointingly) recently said over dinner that he would still describe himself as a Marxist. When I queried this, he said he meant in the sense of believing that an understanding of the means of production is crucial to understanding the social relations of production. (He doesn’t actually talk like this most of the time. In fact, getting him to talk about his ideas at all is a struggle because he has a horror of sounding as if he’s still in the junior common room.) Living on Thin Air was clearly Marxist in this sense, in that it was about how politics and social organization needed to shift to take account of new technological realities; and the book he wrote while we were building the house was a protest against knee-jerk anti-globalization, an attack on the pervasive pessimism of society in the face of change.

  But, as I say, I wasn’t thinking, ‘How sweet and appropriate that Charlie and the house will share theoretical antecedents to do with Marxism and optimism’ but, ‘I want one of those walls of glass like everyone else.’ I, too, wanted to be able to throw my doors open in summer and have the garden come into the house, or the house go into the garden. According to the garden designer Stephen Woodhams, who admittedly has a vested interest, this vogue for incorporating the garden rather than viewing it as an add-on backyard means it is in the process of overtaking the kitchen and bathroom as the ‘room’ people obsess about most and expect to clinch the sale of their property. But I think it’s slightly more complicated: the kitchen and the garden have merged, and both have to look not only right, but also complementary (preferably with some natty inside/outside motif: the same flooring, or a wall that just carries on going when it hits the open air); they have to give every appearance of being part of a seamless conception. And then, of course, you have to avoid letting the garden part of it die.

  I had actually lived in a building with a wall of glass once before: in Bahrain, where, for a while, I had a long, open-plan, one-storey house on a compound (which is an expatriate word for housing estate), with sliding windows on to a terrace facing the street. This architecture, in that place, was made possible only by air-conditioning, and it seemed typical of the flagrant extravagance of the place generally that in temperatures nudging 50°C, anyone could think that a lot of glass was a good idea. The indigenous architecture featured thick walls, heavy wooden doors, courtyards with high sides and wind towers to circulate the air. My house was a defiant slice of American suburbia plonked down in the desert, wasteful of resources, heedless of its surroundings, showing off its affluence. It seemed absurd and wasteful and inappropriate, and I liked it.

  If glass can meet some visceral desire to merge with the light in the baking desert, then certainly it must in London’s drizzled streets, under overcast skies. Rather as we in Britain buy more convertible cars than any other nation in Europe, we seem to have recognized that we owe it to ourselves to have glass walls.

  By August, the house was more or less imagined. You’d come through a front door in a nearly blank wall facing on to the lane into a hall that was open to a rooflight above. This would run the length of the building until you reached the sitting room, transverse across the other end. To your left would be, first, Henrietta’s bedroom, then the large kitchen and dining space, all with walls of glass on to the garden. To your right, there’d be a bathroom and the den.

  Upstairs, there was another long hall. The master bedroom would be above the sitting room, again running all the way across the bottom, northern, end of the building, incorporating a dressing room and bathroom, plus a balcony off to the side, above the indoor/outdoor eating space. Ned’s, Harry’s and Freddie’s bedrooms would sit along the western side of the house, overlooking the garden, and at the south-eastern end, in the other side of the house (the area created by the cube), there was a laundry/store room and a bathroom.

  We didn’t need to know at this stage which way round the kitchen units would go, or whether our bedroom space would be configured dressing area/bathroom/bedroom, or bathroom/ dressing area/bedroom. But we did have to be sure about the number of rooms and their sizes, because we wouldn’t be able to change anything about the basic structure or configuration if and when planning permission was granted, other than by going through the whole process again, which would piss off the Planning Department and Committee, and also us.

  We took the plans home and showed them to people who screwed up their eyes and said ‘Hmm’ with varying degrees of mystification. Usually we pointed a couple of things out, to help them. At the outset, Charlie had suggested we should each specify something for the house. I nominated the kitchen with glass walls, Henrietta and Freddie wanted telephones and laptops in their rooms, Harry, a tree-house, and Charlie, a place to shower outside. Early on we’d talked about an internal, open-air upstairs courtyard, incorporated into our bedroom area, but the pressures on space were too great (not least since I had a disinclination to shower outside other than on about three days a year), so this had mutated into a bath with a retractable rooflight above, meaning it would be possible to bath and shower in the open air, but not compulsory. When people asked us what the house would be like, we’d say airily, ‘Oh, it’ll have a bath you can sit up in to read, with a glass roof above it that opens to the sky. And there’ll be an indoor/outdoor eating space.’

  Hugo, I could tell, was looking at the plans in a quite different way from most people. I was used to seeing people’s eyes darting around in panic, trying to fix on a starting point; Hugo’s moved methodically across the paper, tracing the lines of traffic in the house, working out the position of the sun at different times of day, assessing the light into the rooms; translating, in an alchemy of imagination, the marks on the paper into three-dimensional spaces.

  ‘You want to be careful about this indoor/outdoor eating space,’ he said. ‘Make sure it’s big enough for a table.’

  ‘What, you think it isn’t?’

  ‘Well, you could get a table there, for sure, but not a very big one. You’re probably only talking about four people.’

  ‘So yo
u’d definitely need another dining table?’

  ‘Definitely. And then mightn’t they look funny together?’

  ‘I suppose they might. They’d sort of clash, wouldn’t they?’

  By the next meeting, in September, the indoor/outdoor eating space had gone.

  ‘I spoke to Joyce about that space for your table,’ Hugo said one morning on the school run. ‘She said they were already thinking about it.’

  I don’t know what finally did for the indoor/outdoor eating space. Joyce and Ferhan later claimed it would have been too expensive. Brian Eckersley, the structural engineer, whom we had not yet officially appointed but had agreed informally should work on the project (because Joyce and Ferhan said he should), once suggested that the house would have fallen down if it had remained – or maybe that was the rooflight over the bench in the kitchen, which also went. But the fundamental problem was that it suffered from a serious drawback as a space designed for dining: it wasn’t big enough for a table.

  At the September meeting we also saw a series of computer-generated, swimmy grey-green three-dimensional pictures, glaucously unreal, at least one of them taken from an angle at which no one would ever see the house unless they were capable of levitating 20 feet from the lane. These pictures excited but perplexed me: was this what we’d been designing? I was pleased to see how little of the building would face on to the lane, and how much would be hidden behind a high brick wall; I was encouraged by the expanse of glass, and by how strikingly modern the house-animation looked, but I also felt alienated from it, even slightly repelled. The house looked flimsy in these pictures. It lacked the solidity and richness of real houses, even of photographs of real houses; it had the flat, opaque quality of computer-generation, a strange, in-yer-face Toy Story feel, splat, there in front of you. It hid nothing, and had no way of inviting you in because it held no secrets, its interiors just the back of a computer.