The Handmade House

by Geraldine Bedell

  Downstairs, the house felt open and fluid, as if it were teetering on the verge of outside; upstairs, it was screened, protected, intimate. The (fixed) slats were 10 centimetres apart, wide enough to be able to see out clearly, but narrow enough to obscure the view in from the lane. The shutters opened out to nearly 90 degrees, to let in spring and autumn light. Closed, they cast stripes across the concrete wall in our bedroom and dappled the floor.

  The builders worked more frantically in the run-up to the party than at any other point in the process – hanging wooden doors on the garage cupboards across the courtyard, putting up the handrail on the stairs, fixing the mirror and the lights in our bathroom. Joyce and Ferhan sent a window cleaner (until then there hadn’t been much point, because the builders were making such a mess). He spent all day washing and polishing. The following day, the day of their party, they arrived with armfuls of flowers and moved the new lamp I’d brought into a cupboard, replacing it with the one they preferred.

  The day after that, while everything was still looking pristine, a photographer came and took pictures. Perhaps mindful of the hostility to sterile, magazine architecture shots, he left Ned’s wooden truck artfully in the middle of the sitting-room floor. The pictures were featured on the front cover of the RIBA Journal and the Architect’s Journal. We won an RIBA Award and were shortlisted for Best House of the Year and Best First New Build.

  The builders, though, still weren’t finished. They didn’t leave until May, although work slowed for a while in spring when VM took three weeks off to go to Gujarat. A temple that had been destroyed in the 1998 earthquake had been rebuilt and was being consecrated. VM explained that he had taken it upon himself to be in charge of the cooking. We asked politely how many people were coming; he said between thirty and forty thousand.

  Joyce was often around as well, discussing ironmongery (for some reason the wrong locks were always being ordered or sent) and absent-mindedly pushing my tealights up the bench, or moving the one photograph we had dared to put on display from the middle of the piano to the end.

  Occasionally, aspiring self-builders got in touch to ask if they could come round too. They patrolled the spaces asking detailed questions about prices per square foot (the answers to which I almost certainly got wrong) and planning applications. They didn’t seem to feel there was anything de trop about commenting adversely on things we’d done (‘Hmm,’ said one woman, opening a cupboard door without invitation, ‘this sticks out a long way’). They knew far more about building a house than we did; like members of a cult, they were possessed of arcane knowledge about orientation on the site, ceiling heights and varieties of limestone. I told them some of my little tales of ineptitude and felt I hadn’t really supplied whatever it was they wanted – which would have been difficult because, in most cases, it was a site. Some of them had been looking for more than five years. I wasn’t sure I could have endured their successive, exhausting, failed attempts to secure patches of ground. It struck me that they must have enjoyed the troubled state of mind this process induced; there must have been something about being in the self-build cult that was rewarding in itself, regardless of whether any buildings were actually going up.

  It became apparent, as they talked, that the huge expansion of conservation areas in recent years has been used by timid local authorities as an excuse to stop all new building, even of a potentially interesting and sympathetic kind. We’d been luckier than we’d realized that our site had been in such an out-of-the-way, scruffy corner, where the architecture had no consistency; lucky, too, that Islington Council is well disposed towards new architecture. In many local authorities, would-be new builders are regarded as a species of vandal, to be obstructed at all costs. Charlie said he thought that in addition to conservation areas, there should be new-build areas, where people had to knock down all but the very best houses every fifty years and put up new ones.

  We were asked to take part in London Open House, the annual opening of buildings of presumed architectural interest in the capital, which takes place over a weekend in September. We could have opened all of the Saturday and Sunday if we’d wanted, but, since we needed all of Saturday to tidy up and anoint the stainless steel with baby oil, we confined ourselves to Sunday afternoon between 1 p.m. and 5 p.m. I expected about sixty people. That started to look unlikely when sixty turned up on the Saturday. The programme quite clearly stipulated our opening times, so I don’t know why people were so disgruntled when we said we were closed. But since they’d made the effort to come, I let them look round the outside (which, being mostly glass, wasn’t that different from looking round the inside). Some wandered in anyway. (It was a nice day and we had the odd door open.) I found one bloke sitting on the kitchen bench with a plastic bag on his lap.

  ‘I’m terribly sorry,’ I said, ‘if you want to look round inside you’ll have to come back tomorrow.’

  ‘Oh no,’ he answered disparagingly, looking at the concrete walls, ‘I’ve seen quite enough.’

  By noon the following day, the queue was halfway up the lane. I’d stipulated in the programme that we’d let in six people at a time, thinking that otherwise they wouldn’t be able to see anything. But though we opened half an hour early, it rapidly became apparent that this six-people thing wasn’t working. We began admitting fifteen, then twenty, then thirty, keeping them by the front door while we gave them a little spiel transparently designed to hold them in one place while the previous group made their way round and, we hoped, got out. (Most people were cooperative about this; a few lurked for hours.) Ferhan had come to help (Joyce had opened her own house, so couldn’t be there), and she initially gave this speech, since she knew what she was talking about; but she had a sore throat before she started, so then Charlie and I had to take over, when it became not merely an obvious delaying tactic, but also architecturally ignorant. (Many of the visitors were architects or architecture students, and should really have been giving the speech to us.)

  Many of the visitors had very specific interests.

  ‘How is the roof constructed?’ one woman demanded.

  ‘Er… flat.’

  ‘Yes, but how is it constructed?’

  Another person was exclusively concerned with the Louis Poulson artichoke light fitting. I pushed past the crowds coming the other way, to go downstairs and switch it on for him, but then he wanted to have a conversation about voltage.

  At 4.45 I trailed up the lane and asked the last person in the queue not to let anyone join on behind her because we quite obviously wouldn’t be able to let them in. When I went back half an hour later, the line stretched as far up the lane as ever.

  ‘I’m terribly sorry,’ the woman said, almost tearfully, ‘but they started shouting at me.’

  I yelled up the lane that we’d only go on until we reached this woman or until 6 o’clock, whichever was the later. I got a bit muddled with this concept – whether I meant later or earlier – because I hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast or even had a cup of tea. (It seems wrong to make yourself a cup of tea in front of people who have been queueing for two hours.) Still, quite a few people got the message and peeled off the line.

  We let in everyone who stayed. We more or less gave up on the speech at the end, which probably made it a better experience for the visitors, even if they were squeezing into the bedroom like illicit lovers in a broom cupboard. My mum stood by the back gate, getting people to write their names and comments, if they wanted, in a little book. (London Open House suggested this might be a good idea.) ‘Huge small spaces,’ wrote someone, which was about right. ‘Raw, calm and unique,’ said someone else. Lots of people loved the bathroom and kitchen and a number said to let them know if we wanted to move.

  Despite the wait, the atmosphere was enormously good-humoured: the English middle classes doing two of the things they like best, queueing and thinking about houses. ‘Very much enjoyed talking to the teenage son and hearing his version of events,’ one person wrote ominously.
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  We finally turfed everyone out at 7 p.m., only a couple of hours late. The intensity of people’s interests, and the perfect weather, made me think that, after all, we had done something special. In the early evening, with the children standing on the wall, my mum chatting to my Auntie Evelyn, who’d come up with her friends from Bromley, sunlight still seeping from the courtyard into my kitchen and several people sunning themselves in the garden who, I’m sure, had been there all day, rather as if we were a picnic spot, I felt washed by happiness. ‘No dreamer ever remains indifferent for long to a picture of a house,’ Gaston Bachelard said. Our particular dream had become a place in which other people had now dreamt, and where, as we gradually accommodated ourselves, we might start having new dreams of our own.

  Of all the comments in the books, my favourite was ‘Un concept et une réalisation parfaite; au niveau de la qualité des matériaux, de la lumìere, de la circulation,’ although possibly just because it was in French. A man from New York wrote: ‘Such an extraordinary statement as a home – it must be difficult to live in at times.’ The thing is, he was completely wrong.

  Since the house was always conceived of as being seamless with the outside, we were keen to get the garden started. I interviewed two garden designers – or, strictly speaking, one garden designer and one landscape architect. The designer was more concerned to find out what kind of planting I liked (and I think would have given me more leeway) but started talking alarmingly about painted walls and terracotta, either of which would have caused Joyce and Ferhan to have seizures. The landscape architects had worked with Azman Owens before and would, I felt, be more likely to complete the job with everyone still on terms of reasonable civility.

  In fact, Joyce and Ferhan had plotted out the garden very early on and the basic structure didn’t change: a limestone bench on a low concrete wall by the ash tree, a table and chairs on a limestone terrace, a water feature. There wasn’t that much flexibility about all this – the table had to go over here, the path there – on account of the views from the house and the traffic from the house to Charlie’s study. The landscape architects, del Buono Gazerwitz, seemed to understand this and regard it as less of an imposition.

  My only real reservation about Joyce and Ferhan’s design was that it didn’t contain enough planting. I didn’t think I wanted the lawn they’d suggested (the space would be too small for really satisfactory games of football or cricket even if we grassed the entire thing. My view was that the boys would just have to make do with playing outside in the lane, or going up to Highbury Fields, which was, after all, only seconds away). And I was anxious that the garden should complement the house, rather than slavishly follow it: I wanted something that was a counterpoint, rather than a reconstruction in organic matter. Not, in other words, a completely modern garden.

  While I was thinking about what kind of garden I did want, I visited the Contemporary Gardens Festival at Westonbirt in Gloucestershire, which features a series of cutting-edge gardens. My favourite was the Cement Garden, which, since it was ‘inspired by building sites’, we pretty much had already. Instead of trees, it featured a grove of hard hats stuck on metal poles. Reinforcing rods of the kind used inside our concrete (and still lying around plentifully) were twisted to make a ‘hedge’. And there were some straggly plants that looked like weeds, mainly because that is what they were – e.g. cow parsley and dandelion. Not too many, obviously, which would have undermined the building-site atmosphere.

  An avant-garden like this would have required very little work; we would have dispensed with the expensive services of landscape architects and garden construction people. But it wasn’t quite what I was after. (Modernism, despite the best efforts of garden designers in the last couple of decades, has never really got hold of gardens in the way that it has buildings. What passes for modern often looks back to ancient Japanese, or the medieval hortus conclusus.)

  I tried the Chelsea Flower Show instead, where the winning garden was designed to look undesigned, more like a wildflower meadow, and again featured some rather weed-like plants, artlessly disarranged. The meadow look has been fashionable for several years now but unfortunately isn’t nearly as casual and effortless as it’s made to seem. It’s bloody hard work, because many of the favoured plants have thuggish weed-like habits and need pulling out, dividing and restraining. Since we are only intermittent gardeners, that was out for us too.

  Snobbery and fashion are integral to gardening: it is perfectly possible that Nebuchadnezzar looked down his nose at other Babylonians whose gardens didn’t hang, and medieval monks sniggered over one another’s herbs; but, for certain, snobbery has been vital to gardeners, at least since they came over all romantic in the eighteenth century. ‘Nature abhors a straight line,’ declared the designer William Kent, presumably after watching apples fall in that wiggly way they have.

  This makes designing a garden from scratch very daunting. You probably don’t want to align yourself with the suburban bungalow lot even if you own a suburban bungalow – which, obviously, we didn’t. (Brightly coloured bedding has been deplored by the sophisticated at least since Ruskin talked of garden plants ‘corrupted by evil communication into speckled and inharmonious colours’; nowadays, begonias in garden centres come in improbable hues of a kind otherwise only seen on dress and coat ensembles worn by the Queen.) On the other hand, you don’t want to be a faddish designer drone either, the sort of person who buys olive trees because they’re a big look right now and puts them on a cruelly exposed balcony where they promptly die.

  The clever thing, clearly, would be to pick and choose, creating our own style, reflecting our personality and honouring the spirit of the site along the way. But unless you’re a plantsperson, that’s tricky. Like surfers in search of the perfect wave, plants-people are engaged in a perpetual quest for exactly the right place for their plant. They only really like species plants – i.e., ones that once grew in the wild – and they don’t, on the whole, favour colours, interesting themselves primarily in texture, shape and form – unless, that is, they’re followers of Christopher Lloyd, who has created a painterly ‘hot garden’ at Great Dixter in Sussex. Lloyd’s admirers like exotic plants and anything orange, and in that sense they’re like the suburban bungalow lot, except of course completely different… One way and another, creating a garden from scratch was strewn with possibilities for horticultural faux pas.

  Charlie and I once visited the town of Saint-Rémy, in Provence, where there was a square we especially liked: paved, gently sloping, surrounded on three sides by tall buildings, with a tree and a bench: plain and, in many ways, unexceptional. But on the upper side, it featured a kind of standpipe (maybe there was an underground spring) out of which water trickled into a little trough at the base and, from there, into a rill that carried it all the way round the edge of the square. We loved this place, this open drain, and Charlie said we should keep it in mind when we did the garden. What we ended up with looks nothing like it, but I like to think still echoes that square, in the sense that we do have water running from one pool by the bench into two others in the slug garden. And increasingly, we started thinking of the garden as a courtyard.

  Tommaso del Buono, who drew up the designs, initially wanted grass, or at least a camomile lawn, but we eventually decided (Joyce, far from siding automatically with her fellow professionals, as I’d feared, backed us up here) that this might make the garden too bitty. We would have a slab of planting in front of the den, kitchen and a bit of the sitting room. I was worried that the basic design and hard landscaping were too formal, but Tommaso promised me that planting in drifts would mitigate the effect of the straight lines and serried rows of limestone tiles.

  The scheme he came up with had a slightly Mediterranean feel – lavenders, rosemarys, santolinas, catmint, salvias and creeping thyme – without making too much of a statement. The house makes enough of a statement as it is, and he also included grasses, alliums, peonies and poppies. The idea was for qui
te a lot of the plants to carry on looking good – since we had to see them all the time – through the winter. Round the back, in the slug garden, Tommaso planted mainly springtime white flowers, hellebores and Gallium odoratum, Tiarella cordifolia and some climbers (a white winter-flowering clematis, scented Trachelospermum jasminoides) and three Japanese maples. Around the ash tree, he chose plants with big leaves (anemones, brunnera, angelica). Against the concrete wall, we would have three large pots containing strawberry trees, and on the opposite wall, pleached pears.

  Even people who were equivocal about the house liked the garden. But gardens, even more than houses, are always incomplete. They can’t be works of art, despite what garden designers might secretly wish, because they are restless with sex and death. Architects work in three dimensions; garden designers – good ones, anyway – also have to deal more pressingly with a fourth, time. Things rot, set seed, or fail to, get aggressive. Only for a moment can they ever resemble the photographs you see in magazines (the pictures are usually taken at dawn anyway, when normal people aren’t up, because that’s when the light is best) with covetable plants ideally organized. I loved the garden and, particularly, I loved the way it lent the house a whole other dimension, but I was under no illusions. Weeds would sprout. Everything, in due course, would die. (This is perhaps why we love gardens: they’re like us.) I was not on top of this garden and I never would be, wholly: from now on we would be locked in struggle. The partialness of our control over these trees and flowers was what made them fascinating, and beautiful.

  Initially, much of the pleasure we experienced at being in the house was sheer relief. Bills were still coming in, but not with such whirlwind force or in such unpredictable amounts, and we felt less battered by them. Besides, we finally had something to show for it all.

  It was also a pleasure to be less dull. Over the preceding months, we’d become house-building bores – which was just about excusable when the project was fun, but tiresome once it became a grind. And the grind part had gone on for some time: it was easy, in the thick of it, to forget how long the process had taken, but over the course of it, the shape of our family had shifted.