The Handmade House

by Geraldine Bedell

  Besides that, their own bills would be coming in thick and fast. Their fees were set at 14 per cent of the project. By the end of June we would have paid 30 per cent of that, a month later 40 per cent. By September it would have gone up to 60 per cent and by the end of October 80 per cent. In practice this would mean that every six weeks or so, we’d be hit by bills of around £8,000.

  We climbed down the steep and narrow staircase more soberly than usual that afternoon. Outside on the pavement Charlie stopped. He had to walk down to the Tube to go to another meeting, trying to pick up some work. He turned to me. ‘We need to be aware,’ he said, ‘this is going to be really, really tough.’

  6

  About ten years ago, when I was younger and arguably crasser than I am now, I asked my friend Helen what her father used to do for a living (by the time we were talking, he was dead; I knew that much). Helen, as she was entitled to be, was disdainful of this question. I’m not sure whether she answered or not, because she has a very soft voice and mumbled her response and unless people speak in Estuary English or posh, I often have difficulty understanding them. (In my teens I went out for several years with a boy from Northern Ireland, a relationship that lasted so long mainly because I could rarely understand what he was saying.) But whether her mumblings were an answer or a suggestion that I should fuck off, she managed to communicate quite clearly that she thought the question was a) beside the point and b) simply not cool. She was right about this, in the sense that one is, or should be, friends with people for what they’re like now, not because one likes or approves of their backgrounds. But Helen was particularly elusive; she was the most socially free-range person I’d met. I wanted to be friends with her, but had no more to go on than the evanescent scraps of the here and now. I wanted to know her in ways she didn’t want to be known, ways she had transcended. I wanted to be able to fix her for myself. I wanted, I now realize, to know what her house had looked like.

  Charlie and I had reached the detailing, Who Lives in a House Like This? phase of our design – which meant not merely making sure that we had enough rooms for our family, but that I had enough drawers for my T-shirts, meant looking beyond the arrangement of light and space to what sort of furniture the house would take and what it would say about the way we live and wanted to live.

  We had studied the celebrity chandeliers in Hello! and the footballers’ wives’ boudoirs in OK! and considered ourselves reasonably expert in the semiotics of interiors. When the pictures of Cherie Blair at home with Carole Caplin came out in Marie Claire, we, like everyone else, were mainly transfixed by the bedcover and the lamps. And, like everyone else, we drew our conclusions. In this case, they were that people make the mistake of thinking that the Blairs are typically Islington – pretentious, effete, self-absorbed, lacking a sense of community and thinking differently from the rest of the country on almost any issue from immigration to the monarchy, bloodsports to homosexuality. But the reality – as demonstrated by that décor – is that the Blairs are not remotely Islington, but deeply, embeddedly Middle England.

  Charlie and I had been announcing ourselves to the world through interior design ever since we stuck up our first posters with Blu Tack as adolescents. Now that we had our big opportunity, we felt we knew what we were about. And, of course, we were no more immune to Lawrence Llewellyn-Bowen-style fantasies of transformation-through-MDF than anyone else. All those house and garden makeover programmes trade on the well-understood principle that if your desk is a mess, you feel less in control than if you could only tidy it up. It seems to follow that if you were able entirely to reorder your living space, you might feel quite differently about everything, your whole life. The most monotonous and humdrum conversation about whether there are any clean tea-towels could easily turn into a coruscating cascade of wit or searching disquisition on the nature of identity.

  So there was a lot at stake here. We had, besides, read enough sociology to know that as consumers (rather avid consumers, if the truth be told) we were engaged in a cultural project, the purpose of which was the completion of the self. ‘I shop therefore I am,’ as they used to say in Marxism Today with a revelatory air, although they were only articulating what girls from my bit of the East London/Essex borders had known for decades.

  Our new living space would, we were aware, announce us as part of a community. When I was growing up, my parents were part of a G-Plan furniture, teak-shelving community. When I came back from Bahrain in the 1980s, many of the people I knew were in the grip of a Sloaney-chintz, Austrian blinds and yellow walls, anti-fitted carpets community. We could choose to become part of the sleek modernist set, as promoted by Wallpaper magazine, or join the band of Farrow and Ball fanciers, with old linen spilling evocatively out of whitewashed cupboards. We could in theory, anyway. In reality there was absolutely no question of anything Farrow and Ballish, of anything with the slightest taint of tweeness, snucking into an urban house designed by Joyce and Ferhan.

  Modernists, it is sometimes noted, were the first architects to take control of every last detail of their buildings. God is in the details, Mies van der Rohe is supposed to have said, and probably did, although it’s doubtful he thought it up, because half the people in history are also supposed to have said it, including Flaubert and St Teresa of Avila. But as Witold Rybczynski points out, all contemporary architects are Miesians in the sense that they share his preoccupation with perfection: whether modernists, postmodernists or deconstructivists, they expect to bring every aspect of the building under their control, replacing conventional details with designs that carry their personal stamp (in a Le Corbusier building, that might have meant windows that fitted directly into a groove in the concrete. In our house it means doors that go all the way up to the ceiling, benches to sit on, ceilings that are recessed all around the edges and seem to float – an effect technically known, I think, as a shadow gap).

  Ferhan once insisted to me that what she and Joyce do isn’t about taste; it’s about the organization of light and space, which she made sound like universal principles (and you can’t quarrel with a universal principle). I wouldn’t want to suggest that all their clients get the same thing; I know that in their time they have accommodated people wanting cupboards made of driftwood or wallspace for kitsch Hindu artworks. But although they claim to reflect their client’s personality and lifestyle, I’m pretty sure that there are things that they would never do (only certain personalities need apply, perhaps).

  As we sat down to do the detailing, Charlie and I were not about to choose how to announce ourselves to the world. Or rather, we had already made the choice. We were going to have what Joyce and Ferhan thought was right.

  Probably this was just as well, because we didn’t really know what we wanted, anyway. We knew what we didn’t want, which was another Victorian house or the varieties of suburbia in which we’d grown up. Suburbia is one of those things that people feel entitled to be snooty about. One boyfriend from university who came to visit me couldn’t believe how many Tube stops there were before you got to ours and another one kept marvelling (incredibly irritatingly) that the rows and rows of semis just went on and on.

  What those boys didn’t see was how different all of those semis were. My parents were always making improvements as we moved out along the Central Line towards Essex: tearing out 1930s wooden kitchens and installing streamlined units, knocking down chimney breasts and getting rid of fireplaces, building hi-fi units. Their friends were doing similar things with their properties. There was one couple with whom my mum and dad had a relationship apparently entirely predicated on DIY. Our family would no sooner hit on some new idea – woodchip wallpaper, say, or painting three walls of the woodchip in one colour and the fourth in another – than Shirley and Laurie would copy it.

  With our faces all serious as we listened to our Judy Collins LPs, Elaine and I were convinced that all these DIY activities were not merely a very funny way of relating to other people but also a kind of displacemen
t. We despised them as a way of shutting out life, as distracting sideshows to the real business of living, which was – well, something more like being a singer–songwriter. (It should be said that this coexisted with an equally smug sense that our house didn’t smell musty, wasn’t dark, didn’t feel like it was inhabited by anything other than modern people, with state-of-the-art hi-fi.) Our parents were quite clearly suffering some kind of addiction, less harmful than alcohol or drugs – which were anyway unheard of in Wanstead and South Woodford in the 1970s – but all the same a way of blanking out life, because however much they improved our houses, the job was always incomplete: there was yet more improving to be done. It was only when I reached middle age that I recognized their need to feel always improvable, not settled, final. Of course they were improvable, and they knew it, and they didn’t have that many ways of expressing it.

  So I’m not snooty about suburbia: you don’t need to live in a big house to have an expansive emotional life – although, in popular imagination, suburbia has (rather oddly, in my view) come to stand for anomie, for the sort of depression and anxiety that calls for frequent medication with valium or Prozac. You can find any number of almost reflexive uses of suburbia as a metaphor for spiritual death – The Invasion of the Body Snatchers in the 1950s, where alien body-snatching did time for the draining effects of living in the suburbs, through The Stepford Wives in the 1970s (in which scientifically contrived women are perfect by the conformist standards of suburbia only because they are mindless) to American Beauty in the 1990s, in which existential alienation surfaced like poison out of the tended, sprinkler-fed lawns. In Britain (unfortunately this came a bit late for me), suburbia is now recognized as sufficiently angst-inducing to be a perfectly respectable background for pop musicians, for Morissey and a whole crowd of subsequent furious, directionless, drugged-up youth. There is something about the popular idea of suburbia that is predicated on rigidity and a resistance to the questioning of social norms – yet it’s difficult to understand why this should be so; difficult to identify, as the philosopher Carl Elliott has remarked, ‘the precise characteristic of suburbia alleged to produce the kind of depression and anxiety that psychoactive medicine is needed to cure. Loneliness? Social conformity? A thoroughly modern kitchen? Whatever the problem of suburbia is, it is related to the problem of feeling homeless at the very place where you should feel most at home.’

  Perhaps the easy linking of suburbia with spiritual death has its roots in nothing more complicated than that the majority of people live in suburbs, and that most of the questions that preoccupy most of us in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries are essentially domestic. We are not, as our ancestors might have been, primarily, or at any rate overtly, worried about our relationship with God or the state of our souls. As Carl Elliott notes: ‘What we worry about (even when we worry about God) is ordinary life – the life of home and work and family. Should I get married? What should I do for a living? Should I have children? Where should I live? It is no wonder that the home has become a symbol of such anxiety: home is where it all happens.’ Homelessness can stand in for meaninglessness, he adds, ‘precisely because home, at least for late-modern Westerners, is where the meaning is’.

  Not that this explained how we might avoid building a house that wouldn’t make us think, ‘God, is this it?’ We just had to hope that Joyce and Ferhan had some sense of how to do it. When they had asked us early on whether we had thought we were brave enough for them, we had replied shakily (feeling not merely cowardly, but ignorant with it) that we hoped so. We knew we had to take direction. And they knew it too, because they’d seen the unthemed clutter in which we currently lived: they were probably worried that we’d suddenly decide we wanted rag-rolling and a sofa from World of Leather.

  So they managed us. Their typical tactic was to show us, say, three samples of limestone and explain that one of them was the right price, the right colour and easy to keep clean. They did not mention that there were hundreds of other types of limestone, if we cared to look at them. They did not acknowledge that it was a bit daft showing us three types of limestone if two of them were not much good. What were we supposed to say? Oh, thanks, I’ll have the overpriced one that doesn’t go with anything else and is a bugger to wash?

  At around the time we were embarking on the detailing phase of the project, they expressed their philosophy in an interview in the Financial Times. Ferhan quoted Frank Lloyd Wright, ‘You should give your client not what they want but what they need.’ Once they’d convinced each other, they told the journalist, it’s easy to cajole 98 per cent of their clients.

  The first time they mentioned concrete, I made a face. We were discussing the garage, specifically how it would appear across the garden from the house, and Joyce said, ‘Well, you could, for example, look across at a beautiful piece of concrete.’

  She caught my expression. ‘What? You don’t like concrete?’

  I did not like concrete, no. It made me think of multi-storey car parks, and blocks of flats thrown up in the 1960s, with stained walkways and pissed-in corners, streaked facades and crime-scarred corridors. A beautiful piece of concrete seemed to me tautological nonsense.

  (Not that I subscribed either to the idea that slum clearance and rebuilding was a patronizing spree by architects who were heedless of social memory in the places they were building, because they themselves lived in Georgian terraces somewhere else. I knew it was never that simple: I remembered my grandparents being slum-cleared from an industrial cottage in Hackney Wick to a new council flat in Stepney Green and being impressed, as a small child, by their excitement at its cleanness and functionality, by their delight at not having to go outside to the toilet or on the bus for a bath. All the same, this was a new century. I was not my grandparents. I could see the value of Victorian houses, especially with the addition of a Poggenpohl kitchen. And as far as I was concerned, the whole point of the welfare state had been to save me from living in a concrete building, rather as it had saved me from following my aunts into a garment factory.)

  Charlie, meanwhile, had grown up in a town built wholly of concrete – Basingstoke – to which his parents had moved when he was seven, when the place was still largely a utopian vision – overspill containment in delightful countryside – in the heads of government planners. He had picked his way through building sites en route to school, had trailed, in disconsolate adolescent fashion, past modernist office blocks, been beaten up in shiny new underpasses. He thought of Basingstoke as soulless, a half-baked attempt to impose community through concrete, and it had largely inoculated him against the material’s charms.

  Joyce dropped the subject and I assumed I had despatched the eccentric concrete idea. And then, at the first detailing meeting after planning permission, she and Ferhan announced that they were thinking of what they called ‘an envelope of fair-faced concrete’ at the narrow ends of the house, the glass walls strung between them.

  Fair-faced concrete sounded like another contradiction in terms. But, as ever, when there was a tricky decision to make (or for us to see the wisdom of) we didn’t have to worry about it right away. They just wanted to let us know that they were meeting one of the country’s leading concrete experts to discuss the possibility of such a thing: and look, let’s be realistic, it might never happen; it was probably unfeasible. They showed us a book that the concrete man (his name was David Bennett) had written. It went into great detail about light grey cement plus fly ash filler, Portland cement and pulverized ash fuel with a water-cement ratio of just under 0.5, ground-granulated blastfurnace slag cement with yellow sand and river-dredged coarse aggregates. It was eloquent on the subjects of release agents, poker vibrations and aggregate–cement ratios.

  But, like they said, in-situ concrete (brought to site liquid, rather than in pre-cast chunks) is very rarely used in this country for buildings of the size of our house – as opposed to National Theatre size – because it easily goes wrong. And it’s expensive, though they
didn’t say this. And people don’t much like it. It reminds them of multi-storey car parks. Anyway, there was no point in our worrying about it now because their meeting would probably lead to the conclusion that it was impractical.

  Joyce and Ferhan announced in May, before we got properly stuck into the detailing, that they wanted to get a fix on our philosophical position as regards environmental sustainability. We thought for a minute and replied that our position was that sustainability should be a constant concern but not our primary objective. We were all for environmental soundness, but we didn’t want to build a yurt.

  This seemed to be the right answer. There were, they said, various sustainable elements they might be able to incorporate into the building, such as solar heating, natural ventilation, the collection of rainwater and recycling of bathwater. They were most optimistic about the last: at the very least, they said, it ought to be possible to use the bathwater on the garden. They would look into the various options and report back.

  We never heard a thing about environmental sustainability again. When I asked some months later what had happened to the bathwater scheme, Joyce said airily, ‘Oh, it would’ve been way too expensive.’ And perhaps it would, although presumably any proper cost-benefit analysis should have involved us, since there were long-term savings to set against capital outlay. Perhaps, I thought darkly later, the environmental add-ons might have entailed physical add-ons – bits of building that would stick up, or out, or even be curved.

  Anyway, our relationship with sustainability was not unlike our relationship with gyms: goodwill lasting approximately a fortnight, followed by lasting guilt. My mental dealings with Kevin suffered somewhat here (in my head, he was still popping round for a biscuit and to admire our progress). He is rather keen on environmentally sound buildings; I felt his disapproval and didn’t invite him for a bit.