Dear Fiona
My husband and I have just exchanged contracts on our first proper family home, where we can live indefinitely, and which involves moving out of London. Some of our friends are in the same position and many have found themselves with ‘doer-uppers’; some are knocking through rooms and others are undergoing full-on renovations and building extensions. It’s apparently such an all-consuming trend that I’m not even being asked if we’re planning work, I’m asked what work we’re doing. Actually, we hadn’t been intending to do anything at all but live in it.
When I tell people that, the conversation tends to come to an abrupt end; I suspect the assumption is that I’m a creative dud. The reason I think this is because one person went further and said, not necessarily in response to me but in conversation, that a house isn’t truly ‘yours’ unless you’ve made it so by changing it to align with your vision – which in his case apparently involves moving a staircase, knocking all the existing ground floor rooms into one, and erecting a whole new wing in a different architectural style to the rest of the house. And somebody else agreed with him, and then said that you must make the changes early on, or you get used to the situation and never get around to it.
It has made me think a bit; for looking at the floorplan, there are things that we could do that might optimise the proportions of rooms, or the size of bathrooms, but they don’t feel pressing. And while it’s not a turnkey property by any means, the kitchen’s fine, I can paint the cabinets, and most of the finishes are, if not exactly what I might have chosen, pretty close. I suppose part of it is that I can’t really change the house that we’re buying from a perfectly serviceable and ordinary post-war detached house into a Jacobean manor house. I love interiors as much as the next person (in that I’ve been subscribing to House & Garden for almost a decade, and I’m looking forward to getting our belongings in and commissioning curtains for the windows and doing what I can within the limits of what we’ve got) but am I doing myself, and our future home, a disservice? Why do so many people get swept up in wanting to make vast changes? Am I a creatively uninspired? Also, truth be told, I’m feeling a bit left out of the reno-chat.
With love
No Grand Designs XX
Dear No Grand Designs
Congratulations on having exchanged! And thank you for your letter. On my initial reading, I was tempted to to simply tell you that your friends are, well, wrong. I don’t know if you’re familiar with an essay by Rachel Cusk entitled Making House: Notes on Domesticity? In it, she professes admiration for those who succeed at embodying ‘certain principles of living – generosity, tolerance, the recognition of the human as the pre-eminent value.’ She relates those principles to not making children tidy up in line with their parents’ aesthetic preference, and not subjecting them to the dust storms of renovations. Ecologically, too, your attitude is to be applauded – chucking out a perfectly serviceable kitchen does nothing for the environment.
And it is entirely possible, using only furniture and furnishings, to imprint personality on an interior. I could point you in the direction of artist Michael Craig Martin’s Barbican flat, where he’s lived for ten years, in which time he hasn’t even changed the wall colours let alone the layout. Yet, looking at it, it is singularly and unmistakably his. There are other examples I could give you of non-creative duds not making changes. There’s Charleston Farmhouse, which Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant transformed into an extraordinary expression of Bloomsbury style, while only ever renting it (so no building work). Garden designer Tabi Jackson Gee of TJG Gardens bought a house in Wiltshire with her boyfriend a year ago, and “part of the appeal is it that it didn’t need anything doing to it,” she says. But it occurred to me that I’m in the happy position of being able to trot out such exceptions while ignoring, for the sake of this argument, the many houses that we feature in House & Garden that have been renovated or enlarged, or both, and are more interesting for it. Your letter invites a more nuanced answer than a straight yes or no. And I think a lot of it comes down to type of person, and type of house, your resources and, I suppose, the concept of self-expression and how it relates to ‘home’.
Because we’ve got to start somewhere, I’m going to suggest that we begin with your stated dreams of a "Jacobean manor house", and the fact that the choice to live in such a house, to conserve it and be part of its story, would say something about your personality. Arguably the same goes for a flat in the Barbican, or for an East Sussex farmhouse surrounded by land that you intend to work. But we can’t all, as you know, move into such a house. Reality bites, and finding something adequate and then making it work is often the only option available to most. Maybe you really do have the tolerance for the limits of your house that Rachel Cusk spoke of – but I also suspect that a lot of readers will identify with Rachel’s observation that for her, ‘home is not a feeling; it’s an image, an idea, a goal.' Notable also is that the essay centres on her experience of a complete remodelling of her London flat.
For pre-renovation of the flat, recounts Rachel, ‘nothing there gave us back an image of ourselves.’ Continuing further up that vein, there are those for whom a ‘project’ is a genuine ambition, something they’ve been mentally refining for years, a creative outlet akin to cooking, or writing, or thinking up curtain headings, just bigger and requiring of more financial outlay. And it’s a sentiment that seems to be catching, which is the beginning of my answering why so many people make changes.
I have to confess to finding the situation slightly extraordinary, because too often (and I write from personal experience) doing any building work as an amateur is awful. But even if I hadn’t lived through a significant renovation, it’s being awful is a well-known fact. After all, what is Grand Designs but a 20-year-long cautionary tale focussing on a series of ever-expanding families existing indefinitely in wreckage-surrounded caravans? Moreover, the related perils of an amateur renovation are regularly employed as plot drivers in films, from Indecent Proposal to the 2023 Palme d’Or winning Anatomy of a Fall. My only explanation for the continuing determination to fly in the face of experience is that while some people shudder and say “never”, others contemplate the debris and, inspired by the myriad Instagram renovation accounts, think: “I could do that. And I could do it better. I could project manage my own build, and get it completed to deadline and to budget. Watch me!” Or at least, they must think: “I’m going to try.” I suppose I thought that, too. (We went over budget, and over deadline – but we did avoid moving into a caravan, so . . .)
But sometimes they triumph, and improve the house immeasurably while adding to its character. And House & Garden has featured a range of such successes, which is why I can say for certain that the one person who is wrong is whoever told you that you “must do building work immediately, or you’ll never do it.” For I know of an untold number of homes that were altered after even twenty years of being lived in. Sometimes the ‘exchange, complete, renovate' approach isn't right because of timing, and I would definitely urge against combining a full-on renovation with a major move, for it can amplify the unsettledness and lead to feelings of serious disconnect and melancholia. Other times the lapse occurs because it takes time to establish what to do, not to mention, of course, saving up – for it can all be very costly. And interior designers actually encourage us not to rush in, but to get to know a house, observe how the light changes with the seasons and develop an understanding of how we use the rooms, and how we need to use them.
This is relevant because if you’re buying a house to which you can readily make changes (it's not listed, say) then why compromise? Particularly if you’re someone who reads interior magazines and has dreams of architectural grandeur, thus suggesting that you’re not entirely exempt from seeing home as ‘an image.’ Besides which, even in a home that adheres to her ideas about tolerance and generosity, ‘there is always a degree of design in the way people live,’ Rachel writes. And, to go back to the opening examples, the truth is that Michael Craig-Martin rid himself of a couple of sliding walls, at Charleston Farmhouse a larder was integrated into another room to make a downstairs bedroom, and Tabi says that she sees her house and garden as “a work in progress.”
So, No Grand Designs, I would urge you to not rule out making changes. I’m not saying that you have to do anything now, but you’ll undoubtedly discover niggles over time. They might be small, for instance, the radiators might not be quite where you want them, or you’ll realise that the bathroom-bedroom ratio could be optimised, or that if you pulled down a wall here, and erected one there, the flow would improve. Or it might be that you find yourself, in thirty years, longing for a new wing, because your family has grown, and you need to fit everybody in, and you decide to build it in new-build Jacobean style because you have the time and money. And I know that I said that doing a renovation was awful, but the rewards can make it worth it, and the memories of my own haven’t stopped me from drawing up plans for a kitchen-come-orangery extension.
Perhaps when you’re asked what you’re going to do, you could simply say “we’re not sure, yet” before quizzing them on their plans (which they’ll undoubtedly love because everybody enjoys talking about themselves.) And then store up the nuggets they impart, whether they relate to dodgy foundations, brilliant builders, or the importance of keeping the architect on retainer throughout. For, in the future (even if it is the very distant future) the tips might come in handy. Until then, you’ll at least be part of the conversation.
And in the meantime – good luck with the move! I hope that it all goes well (will you in be in for Christmas?)
With love,
Fiona XX
