The Handmade House

by Geraldine Bedell

  Henrietta, for a start, wasn’t around as much any more. I was slightly embarrassed by the fact that no sooner had she decided to settle with us than we’d announced that we intended to be off ourselves. We’d waited all those years for her to stop flitting about, and as soon as she did, we decided on a flit of our own. Ferhan often said to me – especially when I worried about the size of Hen’s bedroom – that I shouldn’t worry so much, she’d be gone soon anyway. But I didn’t want to think like that. Aware of the fragility of her feelings about home, I’d always wanted, still wanted, the house to be about her as much as anyone.

  Inevitably, she’d been more removed from the process than anyone else: she went off on her gap year before we started on site, and by the time she came back, we already had half a house. We moved in after she’d gone back to university for the spring term and she didn’t spend a night in the house until weeks after the rest of us. But she talks easily about the house as home and seems relieved to get back at the end of term, more at ease with her multi-homeness than she’s ever been. She quite likes it that she occasionally meets people in the pub who say, ‘Oh, you’re the girl with the amazing house.’ And her numerous friends visit, which pleases me because I always wanted to have people coming and going. (Luckily, we haven’t found that when a new one comes into the kitchen, another has to leave.)

  Freddie’s requirements had changed even more noticeably during the long process. Back in the design phase, he’d been mainly preoccupied by stick insects, praying mantids and salamanders. Joyce and Ferhan had designed a glass box to protrude out of his room over the stairs, so that everyone could have the pleasure of these creatures. (They liked this slot: they used it for their Christmas card that year.) By the time we moved in, two and a half years later, the creatures had gone – the stick insects into the curtains of our previous house, the salamanders, sadly, to something called salamander rot, one praying mantis at the hands of a murderous mother. Freddie was now mainly preoccupied with privacy. He hung curtains over the back of the glass box and grumbled about noise filtering through it when he was trying to sleep late on Sunday mornings. The box became a display case for deodorants.

  He remained doggedly sceptical and scathing to the end, refusing to throw away anything before we moved, declaring that all his possessions were crucial to his well-being. When we’d been in the new house about a month, he appeared from his room with around a dozen plastic sacks of rubbish, explaining that there were, after all, a number of things he could no longer see the point of. He did manage to salvage one of the Persian carpets from the move, along with an Arts and Crafts book table and a battered table lamp, so his room has a slightly different feel to any of the others. But not that different, because Freddie principally likes things to be clean and comfortable. (He says, for example, that the utility room is one of his favourite parts of the house, because it means I no longer leave piles of washing on the kitchen floor.) Despite his hostility, he was the first to bring friends round. He still grumbles about the noise from not having carpets and the modernist aesthetic generally (occasionally threatening to paint the concrete in his bedroom blue) but mainly, I think, because he believes we’d be disappointed if he didn’t.

  While we were designing the garden, we looked, finally, into the possibility of incorporating a tree-house, although the brief did not include either a telephone or television. For some reason, the task was entrusted to a sort of artist in natural materials, a sub-Richard Long figure, who came up, first, with a sort of woven nest (dark, prickly in your back and bottom, nowhere to put down your cake and apple juice) and, second, with a platform bounded by scaffolding poles (horribly visible to parents). Joyce didn’t like either of these, and neither, on reflection, did we. The house was too small and too coherent to start introducing strange, egotistical structures. It became increasingly apparent that any tree-house would probably have to be designed by Azman Owens and made of iroko. But the garden construction came in over budget (for some reason, I did not find this surprising), to the extent that, even by our second summer of occupation, we hadn’t managed to afford a table for outside eating. It is quite possible that by the time we can afford a tree-house, not only Harry, but Ned, will have outgrown the whole thing.

  Not that the garden is without its pleasures for Harry. The year after we moved in, he developed a passion for Arsenal. If you stand in our courtyard, you can hear the roar of the crowd when the home team scores at Highbury (that amazing season, this happened all the time). Even I find this moving. It must be quite something for an eight-year-old dressed from head to toe in home strip.

  The rest of the house also has its attractions for small boys. The concrete turns out to provide a very good backdrop for photographs of Thierry Henry, Robert Pires and Jose Antonio Reyes cut out of newspapers. People (architectural types mainly) sometimes ask me if I think the children will develop a heightened aesthetic as a result of growing up in a sleek concrete structure. So far, their education in modernism has issued mainly in the liberal Sellotaping to walls of grainy and wonkily cut-out pictures of men performing ‘skills’.

  As we spotted when the house was pegged out on the ground, it’s not big. Considering how many bedrooms and studies there are, it is really remarkably compact. Yet it never feels small; on the contrary, I wander around it feeling the opposite of hemmed in, as if there’s room for anything. One reason why this should be so, of course, is that our initial reason for moving – all that baby stuff – had already gone by the time the house was finished. We took no buggies or bouncing chairs, nappies or beakers; by the time we moved, Ned was drinking out of glasses and using his legs like normal people. We didn’t even take his cot, deciding that he could start his new modern life as he meant to go on with it, in a new modern bed. (In fact, he actually started it on a mattress on the floor, because it was several months before we could afford to get the beds built.)

  Another, more positive, reason for the feeling of spaciousness is that all the space is working for us: there are no rooms, or corners of rooms, that we don’t quite know what to do with, to become wasted, untidy, irritant places. The glass, combined with the wraparound garden, gives a sense of openness (literally, in the summer, when the doors go back and house and courtyard are absorbed into each other). And our freedom of movement, or impression of it, is enormously helped by the absence of clutter. The wall between the hall and the kitchen isn’t actually a wall at all, but a length of deep cupboards, with the sink, cooker, fridge and worksurface on one side, and masses of storage space on the other.

  These cupboards in the hall are big enough, and flexibly organized enough, to hold all the toys (mostly in big plastic boxes) as well as the food processor, spare pots and pans, box of fuses and plugs and screwdrivers, wine, cookery books, vacuum cleaner and pretty much anything else that we need to keep in the house.

  Slightly to my surprise, I don’t find it unreasonable to ask that only a couple of the big toy boxes should be out at any one time; still more surprisingly, the children don’t seem to find it unreasonable either. We have attained what had seemed to me previously an ideal but improbable condition, in which toys are accessible without actually being in piles on the floor. The children seem to prefer their Lego in a separate box from the train set, on the whole, and the men apart from the music instruments. And they like the fact that the toys are all tucked away, so that they can forget they’ve got things and come back to them.

  The real test will be whether it stays like this. It’s easy to have everything in boxes the day you move in, but new toys will inevitably come, and space for them must be found. I have learnt something, though: it’s simply not worth hanging on to old toys that aren’t played with, or still worse, half-toys. I am more ruthless than I used to be. I think of myself as Binwoman – a sort of superheroine of decluttering (which is ironic, really, given that a bin is the one thing we failed to get). I am particularly cruel in the matter of party bag toys – admittedly, here, on strict instructions fro
m Joyce. They hang around for twenty-four hours and, unless the children have proved themselves particularly attached to them, they go.

  While toys have to be admitted, this is not the case with other stuff. We don’t need any more furniture. At some point we’ll want a bigger dining table, and we still haven’t got a reading chair for the corner of the sitting room, but we’ve known about both of those since the day we moved in. Essentially, the house is complete. It’s very restful to be free of consumer pressures in this fashion: there’s no point in buying a Provençal plate in a French market, however buttery yellow and lovely, because there’s no place in the house for the non-white. There’s no question of seeing an unusual, stylish lamp and impulse-buying, because the lighting’s already sorted (besides which, of course, I’m useless at lighting).

  The house has become what we wanted it to be: a backdrop – a powerful one, in the sense that it makes us feel good – but one that isn’t so insistent as to be distracting. Which is not to say that everything’s perfect, or that there have been no teething troubles. One morning in September, eight months after we’d moved in, I looked up from my desk and realized the shelves above it were supposed to be a cupboard. I called Joyce, she checked the plans and, sure enough, Varbud had forgotten to put a door on. None of us had ever noticed.

  For months it was actively painful to shower: face, neck and back were stung by tiny, fierce needles of water. Joyce and Ferhan shook their heads and said they used these shower attachments all the time and no one else had ever complained of similarities to torture by exotic martial regimes. In the end, someone fixed the problem by altering the water pressure.

  The door to the bin store warped and didn’t close for a while, so it banged on windy nights. The right ironmongery didn’t arrive for the long windows at either end of the upstairs hall, so that they didn’t open and made the hall stuffy all through our first long, hot summer. The concrete stairs showed an alarming tendency to chip and flake on the leading edges and needed abrading and recoating: everyone had overlooked the fact that untreated concrete crumbles where it isn’t reinforced, especially when several boys are constantly running up and down it. And, eighteen months on, we also have yet to use the garage. For reasons that seem to change every time someone else looks at it (but which currently seems to be something about being too heavy for the mechanism) the door doesn’t work. The one good thing about this is that it makes the purchase of the world’s most expensive parking space from Tom Tasou seem slightly less humiliating. In the meantime, the garage proves to be an excellent place for storing my many pointless files of notes for old articles.

  We couldn’t get the hang of the underfloor heating: it kept melting chocolate and making raisins go hard. The individual room thermostats, which had seemed such a good idea, bore no relation to one another (some turned up to maximum didn’t do anything; others made rooms swelter on the first notch). Things improved when we grasped that you had to adjust the thermostat twenty-four hours before you wanted to feel the effect (though some rooms – they tend to take it in turns – still simply tune out). You just have to hope the weather doesn’t do anything sudden.

  Still, compared to the pleasures, the inconveniences are minor. There are lots of specific things that, it turns out, were a design triumph, such as the waste disposal unit that Joyce insisted on, to universal scepticism, but which, as she promised, none of us would now be without; and the large coats cupboard by the front door, which means that everything from outside gets dumped as soon as people come in. Charlie says he thinks of the house rather as the Japanese do their properties – i.e., as if the whole place has the status of a bedroom, requiring bare feet and relaxed clothes. (He has developed a habit of throwing off his clothes and putting on jogging bottoms, which I’m not sure is a lifestyle improvement.) The dressing room is wonderful, too, because it means there are never any stray T-shirts or thrown-off jeans in the bedroom. There’s nothing in the bedroom, in fact, except the bed (and a couple of drawers, incorporated into the bed design), which seems very soothing after years of having to skirt around piles of books with irritating names like Funky Business.

  The loss, to budget cuts, of the outdoor shower space is Charlie’s one regret. There is a non-opening rooflight above the bath and shower, and it’s very nice indeed to shower on spring mornings with clouds scudding above, or to sit in the bath on a summer night, stars scattered across the sky. And I am sure he’s right that (on a few days a year, anyway) it would probably be even lovelier if the glass above retracted. Joyce tells us it would be easy enough to get this done, but this presupposes a recovery in our finances to the point where we can contemplate lump sums.

  Our bathroom has been such a success generally that it’s difficult to get Harry and Ned out of it. They have their own bathroom – a fetishists’ delight of stainless steel and red rubber – but retain their enthusiasm for what they call the Japanese bath. This is deep enough for them to be at serious risk of drowning, which they much prefer.

  The den is as un-denlike as I suspected it would be, not least because it’s the room that most persistently refuses to respond to the underfloor heating. So Ned and I don’t sit on the floor doing jigsaws, as I had once fondly imagined, although Harry has quietly commandeered the space and invented a new role for it as the X Box Room. Ned prefers running round and round the interconnecting rooms of the ground floor to doing jigsaws anyway.

  I’d like to be able to say that the kitchen had enabled me to cook like Hugo. A veterinary nurse who once came in to feed the cat did ask me: ‘Is your husband a professional chef? Only I thought, seeing your kitchen …’ Why she should have thought Charlie was the cook, I don’t know. The truth is that neither of us is great in the kitchen, although now that we have somewhere to put pans down when we get them out of the oven, our slightly chaotic methods are at least less likely to result in serious accidents. Despite the kitchen’s failure to have any noticeable effect on my culinary performance, I remain delighted with it, because it’s highly functional, but also, cleverly, looks as though no one does much cooking in it. In my more charitable moments, I’m even prepared to admit that if we had a bigger fridge, bits of food would probably get left at the back and start smelling.

  We’ve succeeded in becoming a family that only owns white mugs and two basic shapes of glasses, although our lifestyle changes have, disappointingly, not extended to my wearing Armani. But the floors, at least, are elegant: if I did an inventory of this house similar to the one I did at Malvern Road, of things-out-of-place-mainly-on-the-floor, I wouldn’t be able to come up with much more than one handbag and one bin bag (which doesn’t really count anyway, as it’s the bin). I can’t really understand why being this tidy doesn’t seem a strain, and can only conclude that it was never my fault in the first place. I was conspired against by self-messing environments.

  I do have a cupboard in which I shove Charlie’s post. I wouldn’t dare throw any of it away, but I do occasionally cart it across the garden to his immaculate study and dump it on the desk. In summer, Charlie opens up the glass study wall, takes his chair round to the other side of his desk, and works on the decking, underneath the ash tree. My own study is not nearly as beautifully organized as his, although I finally have enough shelves not to have to use the floor as a filing space, which for me is a major step forward. Some of the judges who came round to assess us for one of the awards exclaimed at the delightfulness of my study, which surprised me, because I think of it as a funny little room at the back of the house. It too, though, turns out to be rather cleverly designed: just sufficiently cut off from the rest of the house for me to be able to work undisturbed, and near enough to be aware of what’s going on, to be visited by Ned on his way in or out. Besides which, it has a wall of glass, out of which I look on to spring flowers, two pools of water, and a grove of Japanese maples. (I look out, in fact, an awful lot.)

  The slug garden, then, turns out to be a great success. The best thing, though, is not the rooflight
over the stairs, or the cupboard space, or the benches, but a kind of cumulative effect of all of them. The house has an atmosphere – cool, calming, elegant, light, open – that is hard to pin down, but which you experience the entire time you’re in it. Sometimes it seems to do with the glow of the floorlights, at others with the view from the bench across the kitchen into the courtyard, up into the branches of the ash tree; sometimes with the abstract interplay of materials and light. I couldn’t understand this at first – despite having invested all this time and money, I was still sceptical about the extent to which living in the house could affect me (or perhaps should affect me: after all, I was happy before, wasn’t I? Surely I should be fine as long as Charlie and the children and the rest of my family were OK?). But then a friend suggested that it was rather like the difference between waking up on a cloudy morning and a sunny one, and it seemed to make more sense.

  In spite of the concrete, and the clear floors, the house is unquestionably a family house. It’s warm, and full of toys and footballs and cricket bats and CDs, of Christmas trees and candles in winter, and sprawling teenagers barbecueing in the courtyard in summer. It doesn’t feel like it belongs in a magazine. But it’s also sleek and calming; a house where you don’t get snagged on things out of place. The house is all of a piece, and it makes us feel all of a piece.

  Postscript

  There is a term on the fringes of biology, ‘ecopoeisis’, which refers to the process of a system making a home for itself. The process of occupation would be even longer than that of creation, and in itself creative: our task now was to find rhythms, routines, to start to feel settled in this concrete house. Charlie displayed radical ecopoeitism by getting up first every morning. It’s difficult to convey what an extreme adaptation to environment this was. When I met Charlie, he habitually got out of bed somewhere towards noon; he may have become a journalist precisely because it was one of the few jobs in which you could still do that (sadly, it’s different now). For as long as we’d lived together, he’d almost never got out of bed before me. After we moved, he did it every day. He said he liked being the first downstairs.