The Herald - The Herald Magazine
Home is where the heart is
AS SCOTLAND’S HOME OF THE YEAR RETURNS TO TV AND LOCKDOWN DRAGS ON, TEDDY JAMIESON ON WHY A HOUSE IS BUILT OF MEMORIES – NOT BRICKS AND MORTAR
BACK at the turn of the century, when I had a dog and a wife, I used to do the lottery. Saturday mornings had a ritual to them. I would go and buy a ticket and a paper and then take Roxy, an outsized whippet who loved my wife Jean but was indifferent towards myself, for a walk while I worked out how to spend my winnings.
We lived in Dennyloanhead at the time, in a rented house, the biggest I’ve ever stayed in. It even had a conservatory. From there, it was a short walk to Chacefield Wood. On the walk there and back I would assign the money.
I reckoned I’d need to win £3 million at least. By the time I’d sorted out friends and family and charity and a pension (I was in my thirties so I was thinking about that), that would leave a million. On the walk to the woods I’d imagine setting up a record label or a publishing company with some of it. On the way back I’d fantasise with even greater intensity about the house I would build with the rest.
Grand Designs had started on TV in 1999 and I already had a hazy idea of what I wanted, probably inspired by photographer Julius Shulman’s images of post-war modernist homes in Los Angeles designed by the likes of Richard Neutra; those transparent boxes of steel, concrete and glass that seemed to hang on the lip of the hills above the city.
Something like Pierre Koenig’s Stahl House maybe, or maybe the Vandamm House; not a real place, rather the set designed by MGM set designers for Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest for the film’s villain, James Mason.
The kind of place you might find David Hockney painting his boyfriend swimming in the pool. Not that I expected David to be living in a small town in central Scotland.
Today I am sitting in a house a few miles from Chacefield Wood. It is not a grand design. My lottery numbers never came up.
Instead, I live in a new-build. A standard box. The main room is open plan but there are no city lights twinkling miles below. There is a park and a bowling green if you can see through the net curtains and blinds.
It is the 17th house I’ve lived in. The first was in Westfalia in West Germany, then an army home in England (I was an army brat for my first couple of years), a council house in Northern Ireland, student flats in Stirling, a couple of houses in the north-east of England, and then back to central Scotland again and another round of moves. Some of them I was too young to have any memory of. Some of them were home for mere weeks or months. Others I have lived in for years.
Like this one. I’ve been in this house in Falkirk for most of the 21st century. It is
where I watched my children grow up, nursed my wife when she was sick. It is where I moved grudgingly into middle age and have now started to move beyond even that. Jean adored it here. This house as it is today is a mixture of her love and my laziness. I look around it at the mess and clutter – the paint patch on the divider wall that was never painted over, the clothes waiting patiently (very patiently) to be put away, the back room overflowing with books and magazines – and accept that Julius Shulman would not want to waste a roll of film on it. Grand is not the word.
Still, this is home. Such a small word, isn’t it? Yet how much it conjures up, especially now, when most of us are spending all our lives within its four letters because of the lockdown. Because for most of us, “home” doesn’t mean bricks and mortar. It’s a word that is a repository for memories.
IGREW up on a council estate in Northern Ireland. Three bedrooms, a living room, sitting room, a small kitchen, one bathroom and an outhouse we called the coal bunker for the obvious reason. Cleaning the grate and making a fire was one of my childhood chores – that sense of satisfaction you would get when the paper and the wood began to catch, and you could add the coal.
In my memory, that house is built of comic books and the smell of my mum’s cooking. It was kicking a ball against the door of the coal bunker. It was a place of safety. No small thing in Northern Ireland in the 1970s when your dad is in the security forces.
Once, though, I watched a neighbour, a boy a few years older than me, someone I played football with, kick in every window in his house in a drunken rage while his mother looked on helplessly. The shock of that has stayed in my head, the first time I realised home might not feel safe for everyone.
We know, don’t we, that home can be where the hurt is. That is one of the realisations of adulthood. I think, sometimes, of those homes built on clifftops on the east coast, in Yorkshire or Norfolk usually, where the sea, ever hungry, is eating away at the land, to the point where the house begins to crack and eventually crumble into the waves. An all too obvious reminder that the foundations of our lives are not necessarily built on solid ground.
My wife died last autumn. I have realised in the months since that now even though I still stay in the house where we lived, where our daughters grew up, the house they still share with me, that our lives here were never about the bricks and mortar.
The truth is home was a 5ft 2in girl from Denny who loved cats and dogs, the Bunnymen and Bowie. Jean was home to me and now I am homeless. I am still trying to find steady ground beneath my feet.
I guess I must try to rebuild the very idea of home. That’s my next domestic project. Hard to do in these days when there is a danger that home has become a kind of prison for all of us. And maybe the idea of home means something very different now that we are sealed in by government advice. A word that once stood for comfort and security now has fear and anxiety built in. The question is, for how long? Can we ever go back to that land of lost content that we lived in until only three months ago?
When we were young Jean and I would talk of the house we might live in. Maybe an apartment high above the city, the kind of place Woody Allen occupied in the films he made when he was funny and still safe to namedrop. We never got there. The lottery of life didn’t come up with those numbers.
Even so, from time to time, I will watch Grand Designs or Scotland’s Home of the Year, visit the modernhouse.com, thespaces.com, or (in the days before lockdown) pick up the odd issue of Dwell and imagine the dream home I always wanted to build, a notional vision of glass and smooth, creamy concrete. A conduit to a dream of a life lived in clean lines, without clutter and maybe without any pain. A perfect home for a perfect life. But I know in my heart of hearts that is asking an awful lot of mere concrete and glass.
THE DREAM HOME HOPEFULS
A SLEEK, contemporary clifftop home near Dalbeattie, a lovingly restored former Victorian girls’ school in Kelso and a stylishly converted Eyemouth grain mill are among the contenders as the search for Scotland’s Home of the Year gets under way this week. The BBC Scotland series will criss-cross the nation to find a worthy successor to The White House, a stunning property overlooking Kirkcudbright Bay, which clinched top spot for owner Lesley Smith in 2019. Among those hoping to impress the judges is Cathy Copson, who spent six months taking a derelict, crumbling Victorian building with sagging ceilings, dodgy electrics and rotting woodwork, back to its former glory and adding in a few extra flourishes.
Copson relocated to the Borders from London three years ago seeking a change of lifestyle. From the moment she clapped eyes on the former schoolhouse, she knew it would make the perfect home to raise her five-year-old son Jude and their cockapoo Betty. “It is unusual for properties to come up on this street in Kelso,” she says. “They are all Victorian houses and each different. When I was looking, there were actually four properties for sale.
“This one wasn’t advertised online. I came up to look at the other three and saw it. Even though it was a wreck, it felt like fate. I couldn’t stop thinking about it.”
The renovations required were not for the
faint-hearted. “It had been uninhabited for quite some time – the roof had gone, the windows were rotten, and previous tenants had ripped out the original marble fireplace with a sledgehammer,” recalls Copson.
“There had been decades of neglect. Roof, windows, wiring, plumbing, stonework – that all had to be done before I even started thinking about interiors. It was stripped right back and rewired. There were wires in the loft that were 100 years old attached to wires from 10 years ago. I had to pull ceilings down in some rooms because you could see they were dipping.
“A lot of the stone at the front had been rendered and crumbled away. A stonemason who had worked on Floors Castle came in and the render was replaced with proper stone. The local tradespeople were amazing – some of them came to my housewarming.”
The interiors remain true to the period character of the property with tweaks to make it compatible with 21st-century living.
Was a blank canvas exciting or overwhelming? “I loved it,” enthuses Copson. “This project was great to get my teeth into. I had brought furniture from my old property, which was a Victorian terrace and a lot smaller – this house is three times the size. I’m a fan of grey – you can always use an accent colour. I love old buildings and period properties, but like most people who live in older properties, they have to be relevant to how we live today.
“I don’t want to live in a cold, draughty house. I wanted to pay tribute to the beautiful features, such as the cornicing, but with a modern take and timeless feel because I don’t want to be buying new furniture or repainting in five years.”
Copson had no hesitation about rolling up her sleeves to get stuck in. “It was a learning process,” she says. “I’m not an interior designer. Nowhere near. But I think I have an eye for what looks good.
“The great thing about this house is it has lots of light. I kept the original floorboards, sanded them down and whitewashed them, which I think is lovely because it feels a lot lighter and contemporary – it was a very dark wood floor before. I got a Carrara marble fireplace from a reclamation yard.”
As for her favourite room in the house? It’s a toss-up between Jude’s eye-catching bedroom and the sprawling basement kitchen.
“To be honest, we don’t really use the ground floor,” she says. “We live in the kitchen – we have a TV, sofa, dining table – and that is the happy place.”
Since moving to Kelso, Copson has swapped a career in recruitment to work as a consultant, house doctor and relocation advisor for a property firm, and is overseeing new business for a restaurant in nearby Melrose.
“I love living here and I’m passionate about the area,” she says. “It could be the most beautiful house in the world, but if you don’t feel part of the community, then it won’t feel like home. The people in the Borders are amazing. Everyone has been super-friendly and welcoming.”
COPSON’S home will be up against two other properties – a clifftop home near Dalbeattie and a converted grain mill in Eyemouth – in the opening episode, covering the Borders and southern Scotland, to see who makes it to the final. Scoring each home is a trio of judges: architect Michael Angus, interior designer Anna Campbell-Jones and lifestyle blogger Kate Spiers. It’s a tough job, as Angus – who learned his craft at the Glasgow School of Art and is now a lecturer at the University of Strathclyde – will attest.
“This series we will see houses that are gobsmacking and stunning for all sorts of reasons,” he says. “The things people have done, the incredible investment and how they have transformed the interiors and exteriors. The homes are individual, full of character, rich and bold. The judging got tight because we were looking at so many amazing homes.”
Yet, the judges are looking beyond merely bricks and mortar. “The show is very much about the idea of home: it is not about simply the house,” says Angus. “My expertise is architecture, spaces and construction, Anna’s is interiors and Kate’s is lifestyle – although it is impossible for those lines not to blur sometimes.”
The coronavirus pandemic has seen many of us spending more time at home than usual. Angus agrees that being transported into the homes of others – via our televisions – is ideal escapism.
“We are suddenly looking at our own homes and thinking: ‘If I’m going to be stuck here for months, I do want it to be a paradise.’” In his case, that’s meant opting for enhanced greenery. “I’m seriously looking after my plants. They are blossoming. It is incredible. I have a little jungle,” he laughs.
As an architect, what makes his heart sing? “I love all architecture. I don’t have a particular idiom. I am able to discern something that is crafted and cared for. Those things matter. How much investment, love, imagination and individuality has gone into it. I have a thing about how the spaces correlate. I’m always interested when a wall has been taken down, a window enlarged, or a room knocked through into another room – when people have interfered with the fabric of an existing building.
“I look for things that are interesting or innovative architecturally. It is about the quality of the spaces and how the proportions are composed. Homes should be magical.”
It had been uninhabited – the roof had gone, the windows were rotten, and previous tenants had ripped out the marble fireplace