There’s always an issue in architectural design: how much, is enough? Especially: how much space.
The extent of space required is determined by a number of factors, cost inevitably being one; but there is programme too – and the two are not mutually exclusive. There is for instance no logic in the argument that cost should limit the amount of space one might need for say, a tennis court. It is what it is. But for a home? What is the correct extent of space required for a home? Often the answer is: more – and there is a ‘more’ quality which predominates in one home from this episode: Rainbows End, a factor which lingers above all else.
There were more gables, for example, than one would normally expect. From the outset they fought for attention. Whether any won it was hard to say – they were of relatively similar scale – but perhaps one should have, categorically: because they presented themselves as the front of this home, where one might logically expect to find the front door. But which one? Had it not been for the bright colouring of the door itself, one might have been lost before one even entered.
And once inside, there was more – certainly, there was no shortage of space inside; there was more, everywhere. I won’t dwell on this point (and I might for it bothers me, because I initially felt that more had been endorsed more than it might, that the spatial control had been sacrificed in preference for spaciousness) for there is another more that insists, and another yet.
Firstly: that the building sought to make more out of the existing building, which warrants due compliment, though I suppose I wish more had been made of that decision, or less perhaps – for I could not feel the implication of the original; it seemed consumed by the volume of the additional….so I’ll let that point pass to, and focus on the second more, and the most memorable aspect of this home: the discovery that there was even more, on top of all previous mores, to be discovered…….
The house I grew up in had a ‘good’ room. It was the ‘front’ room, hardly ever used, and kept for special occasions. It’s an odd conception in some (many) ways, to have a room singled out as such – made ever more odd by the fact that it was the biggest room, and with the best aspect – and even more so today, when to propose the inclusion of an (relatively) unusable room in a home would go against the commercial imperative of homebuilding/owning. Yet – that ‘good’ room in the home I grew up in retained an especial mystique. I recall, from when I was young, that it was the room where only adults gathered and conducted themselves in strange rituals and behaved oddly in ways so disconnected from the everyday. On occasions when this room was used, strange smells would pervade the house, strange laughs would emanate upwards, strange hours would be kept. And then, in the morning, the room would be empty once again, silent, and secretive – it would never give up what it knew, of what went on, on those richly strange occasions.
I only cite this memory, because it plays to a point that I believe is significant in any home: that secrets abide there….and there is demand that those secrets be suitably housed along with all other aspects of living. Its an immeasurable aspect admittedly; yet we would happily endorse the idea that many immeasurables apply when one considers what home is – more immeasurables probably than measurables in fact. Dreams, for example – and many attics contentedly exist to house that need.
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But secrets…?
One could argue that such additionality is unnecessary; technically it is. But I would re-iterate: homes in my opinion will always have secrets, and places are needed to keep them, secret.
I’d suggest that it is just part of living, keeping secrets – its surely an inherent aspect of growing up – and as such, if agreed, must be incorporated in one’s home – and more so, it would make a fitting counterbalance to the reductive nature of contemporary home design – as homes become ever more: show homes, ie infused with a invigorated conformity, that they must be tended throughout and available for public consumption, any time and anywhere.
I’ve cited a few things about this home, things that were of a character of ‘more’ than I thought necessary. But conversely, there was a ‘more’ moment, that was so, so special: of finding the secret room hidden upstairs, and of all places, in an attic that ended at the inside of one of the gables. That will stay with me, as being significant – because I reckon every home should have such secrets…..(as much as every home should have a drum kit…………)
Michael Angus (Dec 2020)