To The Devil With The Detail!

As I was riffling through my plan chest yesterday, I unearthed an old job and stopped for a moment to look at the yellowing drawings. Nice, I thought. One of my finer moments. It was a design for a house on a lovely rural site on the edge of a village not far away. I remember meeting my client at the village shop and following his car down an uneven lane, with old trees leaning over it casting deep stripes of shade; and verdant fields of young barley and meadows dotted with sheep each side. The car window was open and the strong, sweet smell of the new grass and the spring countryside occasionally overpowered the acrid smell of diesel fumes from my client's van in front.

He was a builder, and had bought a small site at the end of the lane for his own family house. There was a wood and a stream; a large, uneven patch of grass with a sad looking cottage slumping slowly into the subsoil in the middle. The cottage was to be demolished, and he wanted a new, traditional house with four bedrooms for himself and his girlfriend. 'Something special'.. he said. 'Not the stuff I build for sale - its got to be good. Do you know what I mean?'

Firstly, I had to translate 'traditional'. Traditional to what? Northern Scotland? Estonia? Brutalist architecture of the 1920's? I jest. When most people (who are not architects) say 'traditional' they mean Victorian-y Geogian-y Elizabethesque. A kind of mish mash of historical styles, the kind done so badly by the volume housebuilders, firmly rooted in no historical period at all. The translation of 'good' is fairly easy. No plastic windows. Decent bricks. Bespoke joinery. Those frilly little extras that make all the difference between the rubbish on the new housing estates and Alice Architect's houses - individual, lovingly thought out, designed for a particular site and a particular client - a one-off.

I decided on a simple box for the sake of my client's limited purse, but decorated in an exuberant manner not normally found in the modern trash. In particular, I included decorative bargeboards, of a kind similar to the charming little station in the picture above. They are the frilly white things at the edge of the roof - really pretty, like a lace doily peeping over the edge of a rather nice Victorian tea table. They have a ladylike, dignified yet pretty charm and suit small buildings very well. I designed a little finial (the spike on the top) all nicely turned in timber, to carry each end of the lacey bargeboards. Then I did a lovely brick dogtooth moulding all around the eaves, and around the tops of the chimneys. At the bottom of the wall, I stepped it out with plinth in moulded brickwork, which had the visual effect of cutting down the height and gave the impression that the house was standing on a firm foot; it had a good grip of the ground.*

In short, the new house was simple, decorative, functional and charming, and my clients loved it. I obtained planning permission, then they decided they would proceed alone. This happens all too often - clients decide money is too tight for the services of an architect (even though, as on Grand Designs, they end up wasting enormous amounts of money during the build due to complete and utter inexperience and total inability to read drawings - oh, Alice, you're so arrogant). However, this chap was a builder, and I assumed all would be well. I heard nothing more. Several years later, I found the drawings and decided, next time I was passing, to go and look at it.

Well, the lane was the same, shady and quiet. I drove slowly past the site. The horror! Where was my design? It was the right general shape and size, but....

The gutters and rainwater pipes were all that wretched square section plastic, already warped out of line. The bricks were cheap, uniform in colour and shape, with none of the little variations in colour and texture which make all the difference. My client had made an effort with the main elevation by using partly salvaged bricks, the sort covered in mortar splashes and paint, of dubious quality and the pointing was awful - huge joints, hideously finished in what is known as 'struck' pointing. Awful, awful. The plinth was simply stepped out brickwork, exposing the edge to the frost; the dogtooth moulding had been replaced with a horrible double dentil course, badly done and grossly out of proportion.

All this was bad enough, but what really hurt, what was the final straw? The dreadful bargeboards. They were not the lacy, frilly, meringue-y confections I lovingly designed, but a lumpen effort with a jigsaw which produced a parody of the decorative edge - it was simply a wiggly line cut, very badly, into an oversized lump of inferior softwood. I stopped the car and gawped, then tears came to my eyes. It was painful to behold. There is a phrase, common among architects, that God is in the detail. The Devil had taken these details and given them a good mauling before spitting them out as this shameful satire of my work.

My client wasn't in. I wanted to grap him by the lapels and shake him, and say 'Are you blind? have you no taste at all? How could you!' before dissolving into a hysterical puddle. I drove home and dissolved into an alcoholic puddle instead.


*This phrase is often used by old countrymen when implying a horse has big feet for its size.