In the last months of his life, as he lay dying in his hospital bed, my best friend Glyn wanted to read nothing but Agatha Christie. Despite his Oxford education and a brilliant mind, only Dame Agatha would do. Before each visit, I would scour charity shops and grab a bunch (there were always plenty available). “Ah, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd,” he would say with real pleasure. My mother, on the other hand, in her final months, wanted Alexander McCall Smith. She found them reliably good-natured and his Scotland Street series reminded her of her upbringing in Edinburgh and a particular pleasing Scottish sensibility.

Proust’s cork-lined bedroom reconstructed at the Musee Carnavalet in Paris (thanks to Stephen Rees/ Flickr)

On a much more banal level, a recent cold turned me into a couch potato. Wintry weather made an appropriate backdrop so I had no problem lying on the sofa as the rain beat against the window. I watched old favourites and ones I’d missed, from a couple of Woody Allens (‘Interiors’ still as pretentious as I’d thought it was when it came out in 1978 but the actual interiors still look wonderful) to more violent numbers – the recent Kray Twins yarn ‘Legend’, Spielberg’s ‘Munich.’ I was content, happy to yield to the stories being told and soothed by good performances and interesting locations. It crossed my mind that, were I dying, I’d spend a great deal of time watching films, or possibly lots of boxed sets.

But then I thought of Glyn and my mother, and others I’ve known who are no longer here, and I think books are indeed the final refuge, when the pleasure of snuggling down in your bed isn’t so much an option as a necessity. Opening a book invites you into a new world in a different way from a film. You choose the pace to some extent and certainly how people look, and you become absorbed in other people’s inner lives which no amount of voice-overs and meaningful glances can replicate. At the moment I’m enjoying Egyptian academics in the USA in Alaa Al Aswanyi’s excellent ‘Chicago’ but a few days ago I was totally captivated by Kate Atkinson’s pin-sharp description of wartime London in ‘Life After Life.’ Who knows where I’ll be this time next week (but Sebastian Faulks is sitting on my bedside table).

I’ve been having an odd time with fiction this year. A few times I found myself plodding through novels that weren’t giving me any pleasure. I won’t name them because I know that sometimes you return to a book you didn’t finish and suddenly you find it rather good. It’s the importance of timing. This year I’ve started and NOT FINISHED three novels and that felt rather daring. I’ve always believed you should finish everything, including the food on your plate and certainly every drop of wine in your glass. To not finish a novel feels disrespectful to the author and yet there was a tremendous sense of relief in casting a book to one side and saying, in a rather curmudgeonly fashion, “Just cannot be bothered.”

That’s why, on your deathbed, I’m sure you choose something totally reliable. Not the best books ever written but books that make you feel comfortable, knowing that everything will turn out all right in the end. I don’t want my final days to be marred by umming and aahing over whether or not to finish a novel. I shan’t start Proust if I haven’t already read any. I will be looking for something comfortable, and I suppose that means writers like William Boyd and Ian McEwan who create novels that never fail to invite me in and let me stay until the end. Maybe a Thomas Hardy, but certainly not a Dickens. Then again, it could just be the moment to start Dame Agatha.

A grim thought, perhaps, but what book would be your last?

tomb gates at Lake Orta

The narrow track alongside the railway at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin is becoming well worn. It was always busy, being patrolled by customs officers in the late 19^th who were on the lookout for smugglers. Below the grand houses of the area, in one of which the Empress Eugenie lived, there were little shacks used by fisherman and others. It was here that Eileen Gray built a house for her boyfriend Jean Badovici.

E1027 balcony

When finished in 1929 – and shown off in Badovici’s own magazine, L’Architecture Vivante – it was a sensation. Badovici continued to use it after his relationship with Gray ended and it was here that he entertained his friends Le Corbusier and his wife Yvonne. They loved the setting so much that in 1951 Le Corbusier built a very modest holiday cabin as a present for Yvonne.  Next to it was a snack bar, the Ėtoile de Mer (starfish), which had been opened by a plumber from Nice, Thomas Rebutato. He had always wanted to provide simple food – pasta, fresh fish and salads – for the holidaymakers and fishermen who visited this hidden-away part of the Cote d’Azur. Le Corbusier and Yvonne enjoyed a warm friendship with Thomas and his wife, Marguerite, and their two children, Robert and Monique. When young Robert decided that he would become an architect, Le Corbusier guided him through his training and took him under his wing in Paris.

I love the whole story of that friendship. Le Corbusier designed a little terrace of holiday cabins for Thomas in exchange for the land to build his own holiday house. When I first visited it, we were also allowed into the Ėtoile de Mer but couldn’t take photographs of the interior as it was still used by the Rebutato family. Next door,  E-1027 was all boarded up, with signs promising that it would soon be renovated.

the holiday cabins next to the Etoile de Mer

Now, of course, E-1027 is the jewel in the crown of this magical corner, open to tours. The station at Cabbé houses a proper visitor centre and the whole enclave – E-1027, the cabanon, l’Ėtoile de Mer – is open, operating under the collective term Cap Moderne.

When I completed my novel Loving Le Corbusier, one of the things I was most conscious of was that, although it was a work of fiction, the main characters were real. Most had died, of course, but Robert was still alive. And so I contacted him in his home in Paris, and told him what I had written. I asked if he would like to read the scenes in which he appears and gulped when he said yes. Waiting was agony.

Young Robert with Le Corbusier & Yvonne

At the beginning of the year, he wrote to apologise for taking so long getting back to me. He said that he had been interested in all the research I had done and said that, although he had not witnessed all of what I had written, it seemed ‘likely’. He wanted, however, to point out two mistakes I had made. The first was (and I shudder even at the memory of it) a simple typo – I had called E-1027 E-1017. The other was that I mentioned Jean Badovici’s girlfriend Madeleine coming to the Ėtoile de Mer and he told me that by the 1950s Jean had a different girlfriend. I knew this but had decided to keep Madeleine simply because it was only one scene and it seemed complicated to introduce someone else after her character had become so familiar in the war years. But after Robert had pointed it out, I decided I must correct it, and added in Mireille, the real girlfriend of the time.

the roof and beyond, Le Corbusier’s cabanon

I was incredibly moved that Robert had read my words. I kept thinking how fond Yvonne had been of him, and that he had been one of the last people to see Le Corbusier alive. And so I was saddened to learn that he died a month after writing to me, before the novel was published. I wish he had lived to see the UNESCO listing of Le Corbusier’s work but I suspect he knew it would happen.

He has left a fabulous legacy, supporting Cap Moderne, and handing over ownership of the Ėtoile de Mer so that it will be preserved forever. If you read French then I can recommend his memoir Robertino, l’apprenti de Le Corbusier, written by Louise Doutreligne, which was published last year. And if you’re in the south of France then do visit  Cap Moderne (and check out the photos on its website). It’s a paradise that echoes to the many voices of the past and it will always shine brightly in my mind.

I sit down to write about architecture, a few pieces for my regular spot on Blueprint for Living. I have my notes spread next to the keyboard, things I’ve jotted down over the past days, facts I’ve checked, a book open with a large colour photograph of one building. There’s some banging going on from the house at the corner, where they’re nailing tiles into place on a new extension. It’s really gone up very quickly, that extension. Is it a new kitchen or just another living area? My phone pings as someone likes one of my tweets. That’s nice. And oh look, there’s a list of people who’ve liked my last Instagram post. So I scroll down to see if there are many new names or any comments. Yes, a comment about a photograph I commented on, so I respond. He’s mentioned Michelucci, the Italian architect I studied at university. Spent weeks wandering around Florence looking at his stuff but didn’t have the courage to try to see him in his villa in Fiesole. A small regret. Silly the stuff you don’t do.

The church at Longarone by Giovanni Michelucci

Now, back to work. I press shuffle on my iPod for a bit of background music and write my first sentence. Someone’s singing something Baroque which is a bit jerky and frenetic so I press FF on the remote. Do I really have The Sound of Music on my iPod? FF again, and it’s gone to Mahler and I’m really not in the mood for Mahler right now. FF again and now it’s Mad Men. Nope, this won’t do. So I scroll through Albums and can’t find anything I really want so I settle on film music by Georges Delerue. Always good – a bit of Agnes of God, Le Mépris and that wonderful glowering piece from La Femme d’à côté – gosh, Fanny Ardant looked incredible.

Rightio, we’re off again. But I glance out of the window and a couple of pelicans are wheeling above in the sky. That sets me off on a reverie, wondering just how far they can see from that height. And that the air current must be strong for them to do that. And aren’t they lucky, to be able to wheel about in the sky like that. They hang out by the boat ramp waiting for fishermen who return with their catch and chuck them the entrails of the fish they’ve filleted. Or they stand on the top of lampposts, looking vaguely ridiculous and out of scale. I do love pelicans.

pelicans by the boat ramp

Back to work. I’ve got a few things here – an Australian building, one in China and one in Mexico. Never been to Mexico although my father’s uncle lived in Mexico. He was a sculptor, did lots of portrait stuff, won the Prix de Rome but went to Athens instead because of Mussolini and his politics. Worked with Henry Moore at Leeds but they didn’t get on. I keep meaning to research more about him. I’ve always imagined that he was gay. So now I’m musing about what it must be like to be a sculptor. Choosing marble in Carrara. Rather romantic.

maybe a clear desk is better for a clear mind…

So, here we go. Another sentence but this chair doesn’t feel very comfortable. My partner is away so I trundle his chair in and try that. Much better than mine. Maybe I need a new chair. Do a Google search of office chairs which all look horrible so decide to stick with what I’ve got.

Now where was I? It’s not exactly flowing … Maybe a coffee will help.

My recent trip to Europe was all about nature and walking. Which was completely different to last year’s trip, which was pretty much all about Le Corbusier. It’s not that I didn’t want to see any more of his work, I just thought we needed Alpine meadows and clifftop walks to clear the energy of a busy year. Seeing architecture was a low priority, or so I thought.

the calanques on Corsica’s west coast

We got nature a-plenty. We started by exploring the beautiful calanques region of Corsica, where pigs roam free, and the sunset makes the rocks glow red. It’s a region where the flavours and scents hit you over the head, and where plates come loaded with strong sheep’s cheese and melting Corsican ham, washed down with chestnut beer. Sated, we shifted to mainland France to stay with our friends John & Janie in their wonderful house (www.lepuget.co.uk if you fancy doing the same).

Of course we nipped into nearby Carcassonne and you can’t help smirking at the audacity of Viollet-le-Duc’s restoration of the citadel. Crammed with tourist shops and restaurants today, it feels every bit as Disney as it looks, and frankly I prefer wandering through the streets of the main town below. The restoration, carried out in the 1850s, has long been ridiculed, as Viollet-le-Duc added the sort of pointy roofs that no self-respecting town in south-west France would be seen dead wearing. And yet recent opinion is changing and some experts now say that it’s much more accurate than first thought.

Le Puget’s closest town is Mirepoix, an extraordinary bastide town with a deeply-arcaded square that is more or less exactly as it was in the 13^th century. I particularly enjoy the lovely doorways in the laneways, so archetypically French. You hear a few English voices, too. On market day I overheard one rather perplexed man say to his wife: “I’ve walked the length of this market and I’ve yet to come across a single apricot.” It was late September. A sign of how some people have no idea of seasons now that everything is available year-round in the supermarket.

Suitably relaxed and rather full of fabulous food and wine, we headed off to Switzerland. Nature and walking, pure and simple: the hidden Lotschental valley; the precipitous path alongside the stunning Aletsch glacier; the sublime Val d’Anniviers where you keep gazing up at the Matterhorn and saying, “Oh look, there’s the Matterhorn.” I was doing so well, really, without my architecture fix. There were fascinating chalets to look at and spooky old churches and even a peek at Mario Botta’s addition to the chateau at Leuk. But really, no architecture to get my heart racing.

Mario Botta’s addition and restoration at Leuk

Until we were driving to Geneva airport on the final day. We were on the southern shore of Lac Léman and had stopped for lunch in a park across from Montreux. I lifted my binoculars to scan the opposite shoreline, and there it was, tiny and bright in the sunlight: the little house that Le Corbusier built for his parents in 1924. The temple by the lake, as he called it. A simple house in which his mother lived (and grumbled) until her death in 1960. It wasn’t open to the public that day so I’d agreed that we wouldn’t drive the longer route just to pass its closed doors, especially as we were driving a car that had the power of a surgical boot. But something stirred in me, like a caffeine addict who’s caught a whiff of roasting coffee beans. Suddenly I needed architecture. Good architecture. Le Corbusier architecture.

We stopped at Evian-les-Bains, the sedate spa town with its assortment of Belle Epoque buildings. The original spa building is splendidly wacky, with lots of Art Nouveau details. But, alerted by a Facebook buddy, I knew that there was something better a short stroll away. The modern spa building has an annexe, which was built in 1956, and engineered by Jean Prouvé. He worked with Le Corbusier on numerous occasions, coming up with the metal fittings for the Unité d’habitation building in Marseille. He was an expert in aluminium mouldings and prefabrication and designed everything from aircraft boarding staircases to prefabricated buildings intended for tropical Africa. This snackbar (or buvette) in Evian shows why he is so great. That elegantly poised frame, as streamlined as an aircraft wing, means the walls can be filled with glass. It all looks so effortlessly light and graceful. That day the place appeared almost abandoned, and there was plenty of rot on display despite its being a National Monument.

I had the smell of good architecture in my nostrils and I needed more. We arrived in Geneva with just enough time to find the apartment building that Le Corbusier designed in 1931. It took a few wrong-turns, and at first I wasn’t sure that it was the Immeuble Clarté: it looked as though it had been built last year. Until I looked around the back and saw its row of little garages. Le Corbusier adored cars and it was typical of him to make a feature of the garages, demonstrating just how modern he was. The building is a wonder, reminiscent of the Molitor building in Paris that he completed in 1934 and where he and Yvonne lived. This, though, seemed even lighter, with the double-height living areas that would become such a signature of his Cite Radieuse designs (and which, of course, he showed first in the Esprit Nouveau pavilion at the 1925 Paris expo). It was glorious to see it. Yet again, I found myself nourished by seeing buildings that shaped the architectural world.

As my plane lifted off from Geneva airport, I gazed out at the bulk of Mont Blanc and the lake glimmering in the evening light. Lovely, I thought. But you know, next time I need my nature to be tempered with a little more architecture. Call it an addiction.

the surgical boot aka Renault Twingo

My suburb is undergoing an explosion of growth. Due to a change in local planning law, it is now possible to demolish a single house on a smallish block and erect two adjoining houses in its place. In the UK they’re called semi-detached, here they’re called duplexes. Where a 3 bedroom/ 1 bathroom house once stood there is now a building likely to contain 8 bedrooms and 6 bathrooms (i.e. two x 4 bed/ 3 bath homes). That’s quite an increase and rather frightening to think of the impact on services like the sewerage system. It’s part of the drive to increase the housing stock across Sydney and that’s a good thing if it is also accompanied by increased infrastructure such as public transport. Sadly this isn’t.

My suburb is popular because it has great beaches and is a place people come to unwind.  The Royal National Park is a ferry-ride away and the centre of Sydney within easy reach. It’s one of the many suburbs that expanded massively in the 1950s and 1960s as new immigrants settled here, from Britain mostly. The buildings were a bit suss but never mind, it was all about freedom and sunshine and new beginnings. Now there’s a new shift, as the suburb becomes denser and busier and more urbanised. When I first arrived 20 years ago, it was hard to find wholemeal bread: now there are numerous good restaurants, organic shops and endless cafes serving single origin coffee. I admit that I love that.

different but the same

But it’s the architecture that irks me. Ever since I moved here, I’ve been dismayed by the houses. A visiting friend remarked how lovely it was that they’re different from each other. It’s true, but they’re all different in exactly the same bland way. Only a very few stand out as addressing the site and being environmentally responsible or architecturally adventurous. And it’s the same with these new duplexes springing up in every street. Most have a beachy vibe, usually white mixed with other textures, which is very now. Some are designed by architects, others are project homes from building companies that promise space and ‘luxury inclusions’ for a reasonable price. Look a bit closer and you realise that they aren’t always tailored to make the best use of natural light, that some face entirely away from the sun, and that they all have the same open-plan living space that puts kitchen, dining and living together in the same noisy, busy, difficult-to-furnish, difficult-to-heat-or-cool room. Gradually the whole area is going to look the same, in the different-but-same mould, just as before.

And so I was interested to watch a new 2-part TV series from the ABC called ‘Streets of your town.’ It’s been put together by Tim Ross, a comedian who is also a Modernist architecture nut. His programme gives an overview of domestic architecture in Australia’s suburbs since the 1950s, while also checking out the Modernist haven of Palm Springs in the USA and chatting to Kevin McCloud in London. I love that there’s a television programme about architecture that doesn’t focus on instant makeovers or gets all breathless looking at the luxury homes of people who often have more money than taste. I think Ross overstates the case for modernism in Australia, showing ordinary project homes of the 1950s that look flimsy and, frankly, shack-like, and says that these are better than the bloated McMansions of today. I’m not sure they are. While there’s an undoubted charm to their humbleness and simplicity, the early houses were pretty generic. But he goes on to show a number of good, architect-designed houses of the period that are classics because they stand head-and-shoulders above everything else (like Harry Seidler’s house for his parents and even the well thought-out Pettit & Sevitt project homes).

A reviewer in the Sydney Morning Herald liked much of the programme but found Ross’s dislike of the huge McMansion-style house condescending, and insulting to those who live in them:

‘People work their butts off for their dream homes, whatever the style. What exactly is wrong with wanting a four-bedroom, modern, spacious home that’s safe, has a nice kitchen and enough room for the kids to play?’ she complained. ‘Not everyone wants original design features.’

It’s a response that I’ve come across often in Australia. It’s as though ‘design’ is a bit fancy and something ordinary people can’t afford, rather than simply something that makes things work better and which everyone should demand. I think of Le Corbusier’s magnificent apartments in his Unité d’habitation in Marseille which are filled with great examples of thoughtful design. Like the hinged wooden step to the covered balcony which is made wide enough to sit on (and warmed by the radiator running beneath it). There’s a length of timber along the bottom of the window, too, that is exactly where you would want to rest your elbow when perched on the step. It’s a small touch that makes living there more comfortable. That’s good design, and not at all expensive.

the hinged step in Marseille with the elbow bar in sight

Just as cars in the past decade have become safer, better to drive and more comfortable to sit in, so too are our houses improving. The problem is that architectural change takes a while to trickle down. I’m sure some people think that we should just be grateful for what we have, that good design is a first-world-problem so we shouldn’t grumble if we don’t have it, but as more of us travel and see how others live, then gradually we become educated to what is normal and what is possible. If we’re encouraged to be more mindful in our daily life then shouldn’t we expect to live in more mindfully designed homes?

I came across this quotation from architect Denys Lasdun in Barnabas Calder’s excellent book on Brutalism, “Raw Concrete.”

‘Our job is to give the client, on time and on cost, not what he wants but what he never dreamed he wanted and, when he gets it, he recognizes it as something he wanted all the time.’

Lasdun said this in 1965 but it still strikes a chord. As I stroll down to the beach today, past new duplexes like those in the photos below, I fear that the new residents will have got exactly what they wanted. But nothing more.

2016 was not exactly a year filled with inspiration and it says something that many of us are greeting 2017 with fingers crossed. Thank goodness for the refuge of books. When the news is bleak, a good novel is bliss, inviting you into new worlds and different lives. Non-fiction books do the same. They’re inspiring, thoughtful and make you look around with new eyes. They can help you believe in a better world. So I thought I’d share some of the books on architecture that I have found particularly nourishing and which, despite having read them, I find myself picking up and glancing through again and again.

Le Corbusier Le Grand (Phaidon).

Well, I had to start with Le Corbusier, didn’t I? I was first loaned a copy of this gigantic tome by a friend and I really, really wanted to own it, even though it was the size and weight of furniture. Thankfully Phaidon decided to release a slightly smaller version that would actually fit on your bookshelf. Set out like a glorious scrapbook, filled with a cornucopia of photographs, drawings and letters from Le Corbusier’s life and just enough commentary to satisfy. It’s a book to lose yourself in, especially in the detail in photographs seldom seen.

The Iconic House, by Dominic Bradbury (Thames & Hudson).

Another large book to flick through whenever the urge takes hold, this showcases the greatest and most influential house designs since 1900. Glossy photos, potted history and informed comment. Can’t fail.

The Perfect House, by Witold Rybczynski (Scribner)

Basically anything by Rybczynski is a winner, he writes so beautifully. This book is an account of his journey around Palladio’s villas and you feel you’re there. His more recent book about the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, a building I know very well – The Biography of a Building (Thames & Hudson) – is an insightful study of how the Foster-designed building came into being. His early books about creating his own home and understanding the built environment are all stand-outs in architectural writing. (And he’s obviously a generous man because he responded immediately with lovely comments when I sent him my own novel on Le Corbusier.)

Touch This Earth Lightly by Glenn Murcutt & Philip Drew (Duffy & Snellgrove)

A book collated from interviews and filled with drawings and photos of the work of one of Australia’s most important architects. When he says there is no such thing as Australian architecture then you know you’re in for a good ride. We’re told of Murcutt’s early love for the buildings of the Greek islands and he elaborates on the all-important sense of place. A book that still makes you look at domestic architecture in a new way, which is pretty good for a book first published in 1999.

A Place of my Own by Michael Pollan (Penguin)

You might know Pollan from his books about the ethics of food and food production, but this is a little beauty from a writer with a roving mind. Describing his journey to build a writing retreat on his land in Connecticut, it draws on ideas of Vitruvius, Thoreau and Frank Lloyd Wright, mixes in a bit of feng shui, and adds in his own, very human fixations, such as trying to design a window that does not leak.

House by Tracy Kidder (Mariner Books)

An oldie (1985) but a goodie still, as the author recounts in meticulous detail the journey of building a house, including the occasional creative conflicts between clashing personalities. The outcome: a beautiful house, although the book might put you off trying it for yourself.

The Architecture of Happiness by Alain De Botton(Vintage)

Something of a classic already and a pleasing journey through what makes architecture work, designs that make us feel good, and why that matters, all written in De Botton’s accessible style.

Breaking Ground by Daniel Libeskind (John Murray)

Libeskind has a reputation as a showman but what architect isn’t? This book starts with his plan for the Ground Zero site and zips about a bit, from his childhood in Poland and his early career, to the process of building stunners such as the Jewish Museum in Berlin.

The Australian Ugliness by Robin Boyd (Text)

I’ve mentioned my love for this book in previous posts and it grows with every reading. This book may well be about buildings but it’s a superb and often damning critique of Australia that is still relevant despite being written in 1960. A book every Australian should read.

Raw Concrete by Barnabas Calder (William Heinemann)

This recent publication by self-confessed Brutalist nut and academic takes the reader through several Brutalist buildings in Britain and helps you understand just why these often-reviled buildings are important.

House as a mirror of self by Clare Cooper Marcus (Conari Press)

I loved this book the moment I started it, having always believed the Jungian notion that our inner life is always reflected in our surroundings. This author takes that idea and others on an enlightened journey that might make you look at your own home in a different light.

B is for Bauhaus by Deyan Sudjic

A collection of essays dealing with everything from authenticity to zips. I never read one without it provoking new thoughts. A real trove of ideas and a great book to dip into (although I couldn’t put it down).

But there are also novels about architecture:

Loving Frank by Nancy Horan (Random House)

Imagine my alarm, dear reader, when I discovered the existence of a novel that not only had a similar title to mine but was also about the wife of a famous architect. This novelisation of the infamous scandal caused when architect Frank Lloyd Wright ran away with his client and her subsequent murder is well written and a totally compelling story.

Arthur Heurtley house, Oak Park

The Glass Room by Simon Mawer (Little Brown)

Another novel based in fact, this time about the family who commissioned Mies van der Rohe’s Tugendat house in Brno. I didn’t totally love it but the ‘character’ of the house is well done

Loving Le Corbusier by Colin Bisset (Bookbaby)

You thought I wouldn’t mention it? For anyone interested in France, French history, and Le Corbusier. Or just in the mood for a compelling portrait of a relationship.

Are there any books on architecture or involving buildings that have inspired you?

What do you think of the word iconic? Rather like the word luxury, it’s thrown around with abandon:  I can drink an iconic coffee at an iconic café on iconic Bondi Beach in the iconic sunshine of Australia, which is an icon of adventure and laid-back living.

What does any of that mean? A current example in Sydney is a building that is actually called Iconic and advertises itself as Sydney’s latest icon. It also says it was designed for living, which is good to know, given that it’s a block of apartments. But what’s it an icon of?  Mortgage debt, poor sound proofing, generic design? I’m only guessing, but you can find that sort of icon ad-speak everywhere.

Blogger on the trail of icons

And yet there I am, writing a regular series on ABC radio about icons of design, including iconic buildings (although not Sydney’s latest addition, perhaps). I’m as guilty as anyone of using the i-word. But sometimes the word iconic or icon is apt. In my mind, something which is iconic encapsulates the essence of something bigger, standing for something new that ushered in change. Icons can only be appreciated in hindsight (unless you’re a Sydney real estate agent). It can be anything from a chair design, like Saarinsen’s Tulip chair that showed that legs could be replaced with a single pedestal, to the Moka stovetop coffee maker which made espresso coffee achievable without a machine. A building can represent a design movement – like the Hi-Tech Modernist Pompidou Centre or the Art Deco Chrysler Building – or stand for an entire city or country, like the Taj Mahal or Sydney Opera House. Icons of style, of culture, of identity.

I think you can tell when something is iconic. The easiest way is by its success – like the Biro ballpoint pen or the Peugeot pepper mill –  and the fact that the initial design has barely needed to change over the following decades. Icons tend to be the things that have been endlessly copied – from Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Chair to Poul Henningsen’s artichoke lamp, often becoming  icons of laziness (modern chair = classic design, therefore good taste).

I remember when I equipped my new office at Designers Guild in the mid-1980s the one thing I really, really wanted for my desk was a Braun calculator, the black one with coloured buttons designed by Dieter Rams, and which was the inspiration for the Apple iphone. It looked so great on my desk and even better, it worked beautifully. It is, perhaps, the iconic calculator, even though it wasn’t the first one (Sinclair did that).

Of course architecture is my thing. Many times I’ve stood in front of a building and thought: wow. But that’s not enough. An icon is the essence of the change that made a difference, a sign of originality, and the embodiment of a breath of fresh air. Hence, Le Corbusier’s utterly wonderful Unité d’habitation in Marseille is breathtaking because it set into motion a whole series of copycat designs, even if few of them actually accomplished the goal of housing a community as successfully as this building did.

Unite d’habitation rooftop

Walking among the many Frank Lloyd Wright houses in Chicago’s Oak Park, I felt the presence of a creative energy that changed the way Americans would view their own homes. I felt it also when I saw Chicago’s early skyscrapers, including the rather lumpen Monadnock building whose load-bearing brick walls flare out at the bottom to accommodate the huge downward thrust of the many floors above. That’s the exception that proves the rule –  an icon of the final flourish of convention before steel frames became the norm.

Life would certainly be different without various everyday inventions like microwaves and washing machines but there is often no single object  that sums them up. Except perhaps the first bagless vacuum cleaner by Dyson which made us all go ‘wow’ at its colourful appearance before wowing us further when it actually lived up to its promise. Now that’s an icon of creativity, invention, design and modern living, and probably a few more things like colour or plastic construction.

I admit I love an icon, and the more I write about them, the more I realise the word is right. The key is to know what an object, a building or a car is an icon of, or else the word is completely redundant.

What do you think of the words icon and iconic? And what are your favourite icons?

You know the thing – a postcard showing a view of a town or a building and in the corner they’ve plonked something pretty – a vibrant bunch of bougainvillea, for instance, or plain old geraniums. That’s nice, you think, and send a couple off to friends and relatives. (Go on, I know people still buy postcards.) It’s a small sign that we like a touch of nature with our buildings. It makes everything feel softer, more balanced.

What would this look like without all the greenery?

I was thinking about this the other day as I travelled home after visiting an inner-city house which has famously been run off-grid for the past few decades. I had admired the leafiness of the street and been delighted to find edible plants growing along its pavements. (I’ll post the link to the piece when the interview airs). During the trip home, as I scrolled through Instagram on my phone, I noticed a post by my chum Janne showing a leafy plant bed on Sydney’s revamped Goods Line, a redundant railway line that has become a park-like oasis in the centre of the city. She was attending a Landscape Australia conference and quoted one of the speakers, Thomas Woltz, an American landscape architect. “Contemporary society doesn’t have a real relationship with plants. Everyone’s in Range Rovers … and seems to be scared of bugs,” he had said.

a leafy oasis in a shopping mall

It was dusk as I left the train and I had to wait to cross the busy main road before heading towards my own street. It was then that I glanced up and noticed the silent traffic in the sky. Above me, like the relentless squadrons of aircraft you see in old war films, the sky was filled with a steady stream of fruit bats, also known as flying foxes because … well, I think you can work that one out. They were heading south, across the water to the Royal National Park to find fruit and nectar in the forest. Later I would hear them squabbling over the ripening bananas at the bottom of my garden.

my wild garden

Seeing them brought a moment of exhalation. The tension in my body slackened and disappeared. Being witness to and part of nature does this to me. It’s why I feel so grateful to live in a house with a garden. It struck me that urban life is so carefully curated and presented that we begin to lose touch with its random qualities, like this sudden flightpath of fruitbats.

Corellas grazing

Australia is particularly blessed in this regard. Whenever I walk down to the shops, I am likely to pass a flock of corellas grazing on the playing field and herons tiptoeing through the shallows of the bay searching for tiny fish. The trees are often full of blossom (and chattering parrots), scenting the air with a honeyed aroma. Pelicans wheel overhead in the thermals. There’s nature everywhere.

However much I love architecture and pore over books and Instagram images of buildings, I forget sometimes just how important nature is in part of its success. Creating a structure that acknowledges and works with its site is, of course, the mark of good architecture. The best buildings sit well with nature, and in more recent cases, where walls are planted, they can create eco-systems of their own. Le Corbusier famously said no when asked to design a new chapel at Ronchamp but the priests insisted that he at least visit the leafy, hilltop site. He obeyed and was struck immediately by its beauty, and went on to create one of the twentieth century’s most important buildings, one that responds to the nature around it. How different and diminished Frank Lloyd Wright’s prairie houses would look if they did not sit within the leafy landscape of their Chicago suburbs.

I heard a radio piece recently about a new practice in Japan which is called ‘forest bathing’. Sitting within a forest is recognised as having benefits for mental health. I think ‘forest bathing’ might equally be called ‘nature bathing’ as many of us know the calming benefits of walking by the sea or through mountain regions as well. Does anyone’s mental health improve by walking through a suburb or through urban areas unless it is touched by nature?

‘mountain bathing’ in the Swiss Alps

I love the traditional Chinese idea of dividing into three the energy of everything: Heaven, Earth and Human.  Heaven is the energy of our character, set with our first breath. Earth is the energy of our surroundings. Human is the energy of our intentions. It means that in order to lead a balanced life we understand our strengths and weaknesses (Heaven) and place ourselves in the most supportive environment (Earth) to do what we intend to do with our life.

The tiny Vert-Galant, an emerald jewel in the middle of Paris

I think we’re often disconnected from our surroundings, locked into our man-made environment, that we forget the support of nature around us – trees whose shade cools the heat of city streets, whose canopy filters pollution, and which add surprising birdsong to a busy square. Who truly loves plain walls? Don’t we need space in our lives to observe the smallness of ants, the call of the birds, the sight of trees in flower or autumn beauty? Because surely it is then that we feel replenished and can go on to do whatever it is we do. Like creating beautiful buildings for me to pore over.

How does nature figure in your life?

tropical waterlilies in a pot

The recent spate of terrorist attacks and the horrific Grenfell Tower fire made me realise just how much I still think of London as ‘my city’, despite leaving it some twenty years ago. I felt anxious and eager for news of how it was coping. My poor London, I thought. That may be sentimental but it speaks of the emotional energy we put into cities.

London’s changing skyline

I left London to live in Sydney and while there’s much to like here – especially its proximity to nature and those rays of sunshine – I don’t think I have ever experienced a moment when I’ve thought, “Gosh, I really love this place.” Why do we love one city and not another?

Sydney’s famous bit

Much of it might be down to one’s experience. London was the city of my twenties and that meant lots of firsts. It’s where I found my feet as an adult, loving and losing and loving again, and where I suffered the highs and lows of work. The city was my refuge, my support, my party place. Now, when I return, every corner of it holds a memory, and I can find myself suddenly ambushed by an intense feeling of belonging just by walking down an ordinary street. The last time I was there it felt a grubby, grungy place with its streets dug up and crowds pushing along its pavements, but it also felt so full of life, luring me in every direction. I like how easy it is to feel anonymous there, to simply observe, to never be sure what will happen next. It has always felt like a city filled with potential.

Chicago – Water Tower and Hancock building

But that doesn’t explain how one can arrive in a city for the first time and be immediately smitten. That happened to me in Chicago, in Marseille and even, to some extent, in Beijing. To quote a famous Australian film, it’s the vibe. It’s like catching a whiff of your favourite perfume or favourite food and sensing something you recognise and adore. Even in Beijing I thought: I could live here. And yet in other, often beautiful places you can admire them but feel no real connection.

Marseille old port

The idea of the happenstance of cities crops up in a beautifully written book called ‘Insomniac City’ by Bill Hayes. Leaving San Francisco after his lover died of a heart attack, Hayes wanted change and found it in New York, eventually meeting and falling in love with neurologist Oliver Sacks. It’s a tribute to New York as much as to Sacks. Here’s his description of waiting for a Subway train in the morning:  ‘The air was soft, as if unfinished dreams still emanated from everyone’s skin.’ Golly, that’s good. He writes about the chance encounters he has with various people – the little conversations, the revealing of other lives. I remembered that from London, too, where I would be waiting for a bus and the next moment listening to someone telling me about how his family was driven out of Poland in the 1930s. Or sharing a smile with someone who was watering a forlorn window box and who shrugged and said, “We live in hope.” It was a reminder, too, of a time when people didn’t automatically pull out a mobile phone the moment they sat or stood anywhere. In the Tube I would gaze at people and make up stories about their lives.

Cities repay observation. Simply looking upwards will always reward you with an architectural treasure or an old faded sign for some product long vanished, and London has so many of both. Cities are particularly easy for people-watching. No one blinks an eye at anyone sitting on their own to watch the world go by because everyone’s in their own little bubble. And yet for all the time I spent sitting and watching in its famous cafes, it took me years – decades even – to finally fall for Paris. It felt uptight and prim after London but now it feels just right. So maybe our love of cities changes with age.

Passage Jouffroy in Paris

All cities are filled with history and Sydney’s is a jagged sort, from its raw beginnings. It’s a city formed by migrants, wave after wave, from the first white invasion that trampled what was here before. It’s a diverse place because of that, but not especially integrated, spread thinly over a wide area. I have a theory that its famous harbour is also symbolic of its insecurity, its wateriness reflecting a perpetual sense of a city still in a fluid state, not quite sure of itself. (Although for a brief period before and during the Sydney 2000 Olympics it felt wonderfully confident.)

London’s tweaked Butler’s Wharf

Our feelings for individual cities might be purely subjective and yet that vibe thing is present when a place has a confidence in what it is doing, culturally as much as financially. That’s often expressed in its buildings and how its heritage is preserved and respected, even when it feels threatened by a swanky, skyscraping skyline.  But more important is how a city is glued together by the character of its inhabitants, like the amazingly friendly people I constantly encountered in Beijing and Chicago. Then these cities soar.

A soaring city is only strengthened by its tragedies and terrorism, just as New York was after 9/11, absorbing the new stories into its make-up. And just as my poor, lovely London is doing at the moment.

What cities soar for you?

Recently my friend, writer Victoria Blake, recommended my blog for a Sunshine Blogger Award. I was very touched, especially as the Sunshine Blogger Award is about alerting people to blogs that make one feel sunnier about life. After all, I have a sneaking suspicion that I’m always moaning about something or other but maybe there’s not a Curmudgeon Award.

I first met Vicky many years ago on a course. She was working in law at the time but wanted to take the plunge into the world of books. And the wonderful thing was that she did it, writing a series of visceral crime thrillers starring her private investigator, Sam Falconer, before moving on to biographies and historical subjects.  Vicky’s recent novel ‘Titian’s Boatman‘, which is partly set in C16th Venice, has now been reissued in paperback as ‘The Return of the Courtesan‘ (which you can buy here).

Anyway, the point of me telling you this is that I always found Vicky inspiring. Knowing someone else on a similar road  gave me the courage to believe that I, too, might be published one day. In other words, she’s one of my role models. What I especially enjoy about her novels is their strong sense of place, from Sam Falconer’s Oxford to Tullia Buffo’s glorious decaying Venice. When I suffer periods of hopelessness (which is part and parcel of a writer’s life) then I think of Vicky and see how she simply keeps on keeping on (to nab a phrase from Alan Bennett).

Vicky’s recommendation for this award came with a proviso – I had to answer a series of questions that she had set. Easy, I thought, until I read the first question: What is your favourite building? I didn’t get much further because, frankly, this question flummoxed me. So I’m hoping that Vicky will forgive me if I thank her for her commendation by trying to answer just that one question.

But how can I give one answer? How can we play favourites when there are so many glorious buildings in the world? What’s the criteria?

A building that changes your mood, perhaps?

• Chartres cathedral: even with its newly-cleaned interior, this is a building that stuns you into silence the moment you push open its door. The best medieval glass in the world, a labyrinth, and layer upon layer of history.
• Eileen Gray’s E-1027: hard not to smile at the sunniness and style of the French Riviera and the sense that the world would be a better place after the dreadful WW1. It showed that a woman was easily as good as, if not better than her male peers.  
• Palladio’s San Giorgio Maggiore: Venice might be known as La Serenissima but if you’re trapped in the milling crowds outside San Marco then you need only gaze over to this vision to see serenity made manifest.

A building that evokes happy memories, surely?

• Grand Garage Haussmann, Paris: I stumbled across this on my first day of a trip to explore modernist Paris. It seemed to sum up the joy of the motorcar and the glamour of the Jazz Age. I don’t think I stopped smiling throughout that whole trip.
• Oak Park, Chicago: Walking these leafy streets is like being the proverbial kid in the candy shop. A seemingly endless array of Frank Lloyd Wright houses. I was in heaven.
• Swiss chalets: Switzerland is one of my happy places, and staying in traditional chalets is one of my greatest pleasures. The museum at Ballenberg is filled with countless traditional buildings from every region of the country. Enough said.

A building that makes your jaw drop, then?

• St Mary’s cathedral, Tokyo: Who wouldn’t be wowed by this? I was, as a teenager, when I studied it in books. When I visited it many years later it was smaller than I’d expected but I still went wow. 
• University of East Anglia: a place of education for me on lots of levels, and a place that wowed me each day, from living in one of its concrete ziggurats to studying in Foster’s fabulous Sainsbury Centre.
• Wudangshan, China: after years of studying feng shui, it was great to visit China. But it was on the sacred mountain of Wudang, birthplace of tai chi, that I really understood the beauty of buildings that work with the environment.
  

But there’s one building that soars above these examples. It’s the chapel at Ronchamp by Le Corbusier, the chapel of Notre-Dame-du-Haut that was finished in 1955. I love Le Corbusier’s early work because it sums up so well that period of the early 20^th century when architects thought they had the answer to everything, from improving social conditions with new types of housing to addressing the changes that cars and planes were bringing. They weren’t always right but I love their sense of hope and certainty.

hope and certainty at Pessac 1926

I love Le Corbusier’s later work, too, because he tends to throw away his rigid beliefs and come over all emotional. What better building to represents this than his chapel at Ronchamp? With a roof that is inspired by a crab’s shell, it’s sculptural and confounding and eerily beautiful, constantly changing as you walk around it. It’s incredibly moving to stand in the coloured light spilling from the wall of differently-sized windows that seem to be hewn into the side wall, and to gaze up at the huge roof that appears to float, thanks to the tiny strip of glass that runs around the top of the wall. It’s a building that makes me gasp. It overwhelms me and yet there’s such a delicacy to it. It seems to sum up humanity, being at once humble and grand. Frankly, I think it’s the building of the century.

So I got there in the end – a favourite. I hope Ms Blake will forgive me for getting waylaid by that dreamy first question but I’m thankful for the question.

It would be presumptuous to fire the question right back at her so I’ll open it up to my audience and ask what is your favourite building and why? (Difficult, isn’t it?)

I have just finished reading David Sedaris’s book ‘Theft by finding’, which is a collection of edited highlights from his journals written between 1977 and 2002. Earlier this year I enjoyed Alan Bennett’s ‘Keeping on keeping on’, half of which is edited highlights of his journals. So it’s safe to say I’m a sucker for journals and especially those written by erudite gay men who have a taste for the absurd. In both cases, I was left wanting more. More importantly, I felt nourished by reading them. It was as though I’d spent a glorious time with someone who shared a similar view on life and who knew how to make me laugh.

Writing a journal is slightly different from writing a diary. A diary is more often a report of facts with the occasional comment thrown in, whereas a journal is all about reflection and observation, the story behind the event. I’ve been writing a diary since I was a teenager and I often ask myself what they’re actually for. I mean, why did I need to record the tedious detail of what television programme I watched on 5^th May 1977? Or why I wore clogs to school that day? Sometimes I dip in at random and nearly always I’m left thinking: who on earth is this person? I suspect my diaries are all about processing the day and putting it to bed before I do the same.

a tedious detail

I write journals when I travel. They’re usually written in a notebook as opposed to a page-a-day diary and so there’s no limit to how much I can write. Because of that I write little bits throughout the day, or even set aside an hour or so in the morning to write about the previous day. They take time but because of that I have, for instance, an excellent record of my visit to India in 1995. On a slow 18-hour train journey from Bangalore to Trivandrum, I spent most of the time holed up on a top bunk. I read a novel, I snoozed and I gazed down on the people below me. My journal documents who I saw and what they wore, especially the beautiful family in fabulously colourful clothes who joined the train at Coimbatore. Then there’s the boring host of one of the little hotels we stayed in and who lorded it over the dinner table with long tales of his great past.  There’s even a lavish description of the gentle ox at the ashram I stayed at that delivered the cartload of fresh coconuts each morning. I’ve written detailed journals on most long trips away from home, including the bleak and blurry visit to England to witness the last two weeks of my mother’s life and the aftermath. I delve into them only very occasionally but really, why write them at all?

getting a broad picture

I think writing a journal is not just necessary but inevitable if you’re a writer. You’ll know what I mean if you’re the type who wakes at night with a beautiful sentence rolling around in your head. You have to write it down. Throughout the day certain words catch your attention as do particular interactions with other people. You might find yourself on top of a mountain and a word strikes you as perfect to encapsulate the feeling of that moment. It has to be written down otherwise it’ll bother you all day long. Writers fear losing words, despite the fact that we chuck away so many during editing, but more than that, we fear forgetting something significant, even if it’s only the significance of the odd way someone served you coffee.

Sometimes, when I feel blocked and uncertain, it’s good to look back over the journals. They remind me of how I think (or used to think) and what grabbed my attention. They often inspire me. Sometimes, when I’m writing about a specific place or a building, they provide detail that I can’t find anywhere else. How else would I recall the colour of the pieces of glass embedded in the concrete at the Unite d’habitation in Marseille? Or remember the receptionist at a thermal baths in the Pyrenees who kept us waiting while she gossiped on the phone. “Oh la la,” she said. “Oh la la. Oh  la la la la.” My partner Anthony couldn’t believe French people actually said that. As far as we could make out, this French woman could say nothing else.

That’s what journals are for. That’s why they’re worth keeping and why they’re worth reading. Diaries might remind me what I was doing (or not doing) in the past but journals fill in the gaps and tell a richer, fuller story. You end up with dozens, even hundreds of little notebooks: the idea of chucking any of them out is strictly verboten. But if you think you can have too much of a good thing, please don’t tell Messrs Sedaris and Bennett.

Do you journal?

I don’t always ‘get’ cafés. They used to say in London that you were never more than six feet away from a rat. In my suburb, the same might apply with cups of coffee. Cafés line the main shopping street and are tucked down laneways and there are two virtually on the beach. There’s one in the library so the smell of coffee wafts among the book shelves, urging me to chuck the book from my hand and order a cappuccino instead. Even the little parade of shops around the corner from my house, which used to be handy for picking up a newspaper or milk and not much else, is now home to two cafés that are always heaving. One is boisterously full of tradies and surfers grabbing meat pies with their flat whites while the other – the one with the Range Rovers lined up outside – is Yummy Mummy Heaven, apparently the perfect place to catch up with the gals over a soy chai latte and a paleo poached chicken focaccia.

What is it that makes cafés so alluring? They’re obviously people places but they’re creative spaces, too. If anyone furthered the romanticism of writing in cafes it was J K Rowling who famously wrote the first Harry Potter while huddled at a table in an Edinburgh café. And, of course, there are the famous cultural cafés of Europe, like those in Paris that were frequented by everyone from Apollinaire and Picasso to Sartre and Hemingway. As my readers will know, Yvonne Le Corbusier loved a coffee and a fag in the Deux Magots on the way home from the market. Vienna’s café scene was just as vibrant, only with more cream, and doubtless so was Berlin’s. There were probably famous ones in Britain, too, but all I can think of is the grim station café in the 1945 film ‘Brief Encounter’ where tea is served from an urn and Celia Johnson looks so terribly, terribly anxious.

I remember a couple of cafés in the Welsh market town where I grew up. They were rather basic places and their windows steamed up in winter. As a ten year old I found them threatening because people seemed to hang out there all day, which in my pompous little mind translated to being up to no good (they were probably  up to nothing at all, which is another point of cafés). As children on holiday in Scotland, we often went to cafés, only they call them Tea Rooms, which were rather prim and proper places full of old people eating a variety of iced cakes (Scottish life has a tendency towards sugar, flour and fat).

Flickr image: Savage Cats

When I moved to Harrogate as a teenager, I became acquainted with grander cafés. The best known were Betty’s and the Imperial but there were plenty of others. When Betty’s moved into the Imperial’s premises, it became more sumptuous, with large areas of white-clothed tables and walls filled with complicated marquetry pictures that were stolen some years later. For a while, some of its staff looked as though they’d worked there since the 1930s, which was entirely possible. I would linger there for hours after school with my best friend Glyn, sharing secrets and laughing raucously, and eking out our single pot of tea with an endless supply of hot water provided by the waitress (brought from the kitchen – she didn’t have an inbuilt reservoir). Gradually Betty’s became more famous and today there are always long queues outside with people eager to nibble on a Fat Rascal (a type of scone). In my opinion, it’s lost much of its charm and feels rather fake.

There was also a Betty’s in York, which was scruffier but it still had a good selection of cream slices. Nearby there was a Terry’s tearoom, which is long gone, and which had a fabulous restaurant upstairs that was lined in sombre dark wood like an old bank. Lunch there started with orange juice out of a tin or brown soup, and they served things like Welsh Rarebit or chops. It was the sort of food that some foreigners still think Britain serves, not realising that Britain has gone gastro since the 1990s.

I like cafés, though, or at least the idea of them. For an Australian generation brought up on the cafés of ‘Neighbours’ and ‘Home & Away’ (okay, that was a diner), cafés are important social hubs, in the way pubs are in Britain. They make you feel connected, part of society, doing what other people do. Some people may be writing bestselling novels in them or flirting with the person at the next table or chatting about sport or television.

I have often felt guilty that I don’t frequent the local cafés in my suburb. When the man from the deli told me he was opening one across the road, I blurted out, rather ungraciously, that I don’t do cafés here unless I have to. What I meant was that it seems odd to me to go to a café  so close to home. And yet I love sitting in cafés in France for breakfast or a coffee, and I often met up with my partner in one on Old Compton Street in London in the days before we lived together. Here, well, I drink coffee at home.

Except something’s shifted recently and I have taken to strolling down to a café once or twice a week. I have a favourite. It used to sell nothing but coffee – no cakes, no teas, no soft drinks, this was a den for serious caffeine addicts – but now it’s splashed out on a plate of muffins under a glass dome and a few bottles of ginger pop. Ah, I think with awe as I enter, here be people.  When you live in your head as much as I do, it’s good to be reminded of the real world out there, uncurated by social media. Thirty minutes later I’m gone. Sitting there usually sparks some train of thought and I just have to get back to my desk to write it down.

So maybe I do ‘get’ it after all, it’s just that I’m a slow-learner.

Do you café?

I’m a fool for a doorway. Thankfully, there are several Instagram sites that feed my addiction so I can peruse the doorways of Paris or Chicago or London to my heart’s content. Doors draw us towards them and invite us to walk through them. They can be a powerful barrier, too, telling us that this way is barred unless we can perform some magic, like ring a bell, rap three times, or show a pass.

A door is the finishing touch to a building. More important is how the building itself addresses its site. For most of us that means looking at how a building sits in the streetscape. What does the building do? Does it draw us towards its entrance? Does it welcome us?

When I carried out feng shui consultations, I often had calls from new clients who felt that their lives were going nowhere and that opportunity was most definitely not knocking on their door. They felt lost. Almost without fail I would arrive at the address they had given me and think: where is it? Sometimes the entire building was hidden from view, tucked behind others or accessible only by a hidden-away gate. Often I wouldn’t be able to find the entrance door, or at least it would take a few attempts, being led down the wrong side of a building by a path that looked more important than another. Street numbers were often missing or covered by plants so that I had to work out from looking at neighbouring buildings where to go. Office buildings had locked doors or entrance buzzers that didn’t work.

In feng shui terms, if I couldn’t find their home or business then there was little doubt that chi (or qi or life-force energy, call it what you will) would also have the same problem. All the life-giving energy of health, wealth, and opportunity skipped past the building, draining the energy of those who lived and worked inside.

You only have to look at the way that traditional Chinese buildings address the street. Stone lions and colourful arches announce the grandest ones, from monasteries to bank buildings. Even lowly homes use colour to make them stand out. Clarity is always the message. You may be sceptical of all this kind of symbolism, as indeed I used to be, until I kept coming across the same dire situations time after time when it was missing. Inevitably, I still find myself referring to feng shui principles when I look at buildings.

Frank Lloyd Wright was a terror for hiding the entrance door. He adored privacy, hence his Prairie houses of the early 20^th century usually have terraces and balconies with walls that are just high enough to hide you if you want to sit there. Front doors are often tucked around corners, sometimes in shadowy places so that you’re hidden from view from the street. Perfect for secret assignations, of which Mr Wright was partial.

While his doorways may be hidden, his buildings make up for it by making a strong statement on the street. They spread outwards with his signature horizontal lines, with barely a drainpipe to disrupt it, creating a pleasing and generous streetscape.

Villa Maser

The wealthy (and their architects) have always understood the power of site. The splendid C16th villas designed by Andrea Palladio are usually sited to impress from afar and to give grand views over the landscape. They influenced the imposing country houses of Britain of the following centuries (and, to some extent, municipal town halls and schools). Even if a magnificent house is hidden away from the road, it has a stonking great gateway so that you’re left in no doubt that something glorious lies beyond.

We don‘t expect that kind of thing in our domestic landscape today, and houses often present a huge blank garage door to the street with the front door tucked away around the side. That’s logical, of course, because the car needs access space. But buildings are made for people and people are not entirely logical. We always have an emotional response to buildings, whether they’re office blocks or single dwellings.

Le Corbusier understood the importance of setting and entrances. His fabulous Unité d’habitation in Marseille is angled to the broad Boulevard Michelet. It’s the only building on the boulevard that does this because the architect was more interested in scooping up sunlight and views than presenting a big façade to the street. There are no apartments on the sunless northern side and as the majority of apartments run from east to west through the building, they utilise the best light from both the rising and the setting sun. The building is accessed through one large entrance, as Le Corbusier wanted everyone to have a sense of the building as a single home, even if everyone knew (rationally) that there were over 330 apartments inside.

I found myself pondering the idea of site and entrance the other day as I walked past a building in my suburb that was supposedly built facing the wrong way. Its main façade is covered with balconies and faces north (our light source in the southern hemisphere)). The back of the building is peppered with small utilitarian windows denoting secondary rooms like bathrooms and third bedrooms. That all makes perfect sense until you realise that the building sits right on the seafront. In other words, the sun-trap balconies and large living room windows face a rather ugly streetscape whereas the lavatory gets a stunning view of the sparkling ocean. It’s mind-boggling how nobody seemed to twig that the structure was going up the wrong way. Maybe the logic of gaining maximum sunlight outweighs the fantastic view but I reckon most people would prefer to look at the sea than the street.

As I write this, a house on my street is struggling to find a buyer. It’s been stylishly renovated and the housing market is booming and yet there’s very little interest in this house. My feng shui eyes tell me why. It’s tucked away down a slope, hidden from view. In my opinion, the life-enhancing energy of possibility (and sales) is wafting along the street, unaware of this hidden retreat. There’s precious little the owners can do about the site, of course, and I’m sure the house will sell eventually, but at a lower price than any comparable house that addresses the street more forcefully.

This house in Kew, designed by Sean Godsell, owns its site

A building that owns its site and has a clearly marked entrance is a well-designed building. It’s been planned for people to use rather than simply to look at. Mindfulness is present. It’s my experience that this sort of building succeeds because it rewards the people who live and work within it. And when opportunity comes a-knocking (and it will) then the folks inside will welcome it in with a huge hello and get their bags packed for the next adventure.

Have you ever lived or worked in a badly-sited building?

The house next door has been demolished, leaving a rectangle of bare earth. In feng shui, that side of my house represents the Tiger, which is often affiliated with emotional support (the other side is the protective Dragon) so it’s no wonder that its emptiness has left me feeling a bit all over the place. What will rise over the next months is a pair of houses, probably more attractive than what was there before (a 1950s brick bungalow) and definitely bigger. Where the old house was set back on its block, the new houses will sit forward, directly next to mine. Being two storeys, there will be some loss of light, which is to be expected. At the moment my kitchen window welcomes the morning sun and lets me gaze at the rising moon as I prepare dinner but soon there will be the slab side of a new house. That’s progress, I suppose.

So it’s not surprising – emotions and all – that I wonder if this might be a good time to move. We’ve lived in this house for twenty years, and done our own tweaks and renovations, and transformed the grassed garden into something that people call a jungle, not always meaning to be kind. The possums are happy, as are the birds, and the big blue-tongue lizard finds lots of quiet spaces to bask in the sun. It’s chaotic and overgrown but filled with colour and birds, butterflies and dragonflies. We like our nature.

And so we wonder, as this suburb becomes ever more developed, with large trees torn down and single houses replaced by pairs or more, whether it would be good to move somewhere that values nature a little more than ours does. A place with more trees, perhaps. And yet…

I live a short walk from the Pacific ocean. To get there, I pass a quiet bay filled with anchored boats where pelicans linger for scraps when the fishermen come back. The main beach is close to the shops and cafés of my suburb. It’s quite small and quickly fills on hot days. But there’s also a very long beach that takes an hour or more to walk from one end to the other, and which used to be backed by giant sand dunes until they were mined flat for building material. When we first moved here I used to drive out to this beach’s midway point early in the morning. As the sun rose out of the sea, there would be a few others there – surfers and sporty types, mostly, like our local football team and swimmers like Ian Thorpe, who would greet me with a smile. I would walk for an hour at the start of my day and afterwards be ready to face a day at work.

The ocean feels like a wilderness, no more so than when the waves rise so high you can’t see the horizon and the spray leaves your skin sticky with salt. Sometimes on those walks there was drama. Once, a bloated, naked corpse washed ashore. Another time, the beach was littered with the bodies of hundreds or maybe thousands of birds. Some still flapped pathetically, tumbling over in the sand. They were shearwaters, called mutton birds here because they were once killed for their robust-flavoured meat. They fly a huge distance each year from the Arctic and this mob had obviously endured a worse than usual voyage, dropping exhausted from the sky as they came close to their destination. It was heart-breaking to see. I tried to rescue a few but of course they died, probably speeded by my interference. It’s the way of nature, but haunting, all the same.

Now, though, I walk regularly along a paved pathway called the Esplanade that follows the coastline of the suburb’s peninsula. On wet or windy days it’s often deserted, meaning I can walk with my head bowed, like a walking meditation. At weekends it’s busy with runners and blocked by chatting groups, ambling along four or five abreast, unaware of the unspoken rule that people keep to the left. There are no roads to cross, no steps to stumble on, just a long and winding path. It’s a soothing place to be. I often see dolphins and whales. Yesterday, I watched as a whale repeatedly slapped the water with its long, white fin, even though the annual northern migration of whales is over. It must be an optimist happy to be heading south again for the summer.

I see various familiar people, some I’ve encountered for years now. A few I greet with a smile; with others I exchange a few words: “Windy enough for you?” “Hot, isn’t it!” “Did you see the dolphins?” That’s about it but it leaves me smiling. Other people I recognise but we never say hello, never smile, and sometimes even look to one side as though we simply haven’t noticed each other, although we have. I imagine they don’t want to be bothered with people (or me) and I don’t mind that. Some days I don’t want to see anyone, either, happy to walk with my thoughts, blind to people.

Across the water lies the sand and rocks that edge the dark greenery of the Royal National Park. People proudly tell you that it’s the second oldest national park after Yellowstone, which makes it sound as though its wilderness didn’t exist before the Park was proclaimed.

The path is lined by houses and apartment blocks on one side. I sometimes set myself the task of which one I would move to, if I really had to. Most are pretty ugly, I have to admit, and sometimes I think I’d demolish the lot of them. Other times I’m less critical and see the pleasure people have in sitting on their terraces with a view of yachts tacking in the breeze on a Wednesday evening (sailing club night). My judgment is jealousy.

I usually feel refreshed by the time I am walking back along my street. I look at the bland houses, nothing of architectural interest although some people say ‘wow’ when they see the wooden American-style house at the corner. I remember the places where large trees used to stand, and see the familiar cars parked in driveways and along the curb. Often I startle the parrots from the bottlebrushes and the grevilleas in front of my house but they come back quickly if the nectar is good.

And that’s when I think that maybe I belong here. Maybe this is home. Maybe we will stay, despite the lack of a moonrise in the kitchen. And I think, really, that’s progress.

Do you love where you live?

I was at a talk recently where an architect took us through the idea of baugruppen*. This is the German term for affordable community housing funded by its residents, and it’s an idea generating interest in places around the world where property is becoming ever more unaffordable (like Sydney). We were shown examples in Berlin and they all looked lovely: modern buildings with spacious rooms, plenty of light, and loads of sustainable brownie points. And then our presenter mentioned something that chilled my blood. It was when she showed a photograph of the large courtyard garden in one development, into which the living rooms of two long blocks of apartments led. “And here,” she remarked, “is where people come out and meet, and where children play.” I managed to contain my groan. Because that’s my main objection to community living – other people. Or more precisely, the noise of other people.

In my mind, I’m sitting in my lovely, blond-wood apartment in Berlin, gazing through the open windows to the green space outside and thinking what a treasure this is to find in the middle of the city. The peace is broken by the sound of a crying baby and then some children run past my window, perhaps playing hide-and-seek, or chased by another group on tricycles. Their excited shrieks fill the air. Adults are gossiping nearby in one of the communal seating areas, and I know there’s going to be a barbecue later which will probably run on late. And as I look out at all this, my lovely, community-minded mind is saying: please, just shut the fuck up.

Now what sort of curmudgeon am I, when I recoil at the sound of children’s laughter and the gentle murmur of people talking? That’s right, I am a very curmudgeonly curmudgeon indeed. Because, while the general idea of living in a community appeals to me in theory, I know that I don’t want to be bothered with it if I don’t want to be bothered with it. And I certainly don’t want to hear my community all the time. And this is my main gripe, because so often architects seem to turn a deaf ear to the notion of the intrusion of noise. And I don’t understand why. Despite my baugruppen example, it’s something that affects domestic architecture as a whole.

Noise is one of the reasons people escape to the country from cities, to get away from sirens and cars, but also from the constant buzz of human voices. And while the countryside is certainly no haven of peace – the monotonous drone of agricultural machinery and mooing cows drifts for miles over open fields – it’s a different soundscape, usually less sharp, not so much in your face. Two or three days away and you feel refreshed. And yet we continue to build with little consideration for the way in which noise impacts on each of us.

advert for a gated community in China

As I’ve mentioned before, thanks to newly-relaxed planning laws, many of the old single houses of my neighbourhood are being replaced with developments of two or more dwellings, sometimes in clusters. Often it means that the main windows of some of these new buildings are placed along shared boundaries, instead of the old-fashioned suburban way of orienting main windows to the front and back (i.e. overlooking its own land) and putting secondary windows for bathrooms and hallways to the side. Now most architects have to take into account privacy and so they add screens and carefully-tilted louvres and even set windows up high so that neighbours won’t feel overlooked. But little is done about noise. The glass in a window doesn’t stop noise nearly so well as a wall, unless it is triple-glazed, which is rarely done here. Screens and louvres don’t restrain sound at all. And thanks to our warm and breezy climate, most people like to have their windows open for ventilation. Hence noise is fed out into the neighbouring homes. While it might seem like inconsequential stuff in isolation – the sound of television or music, a loud conversation, the high-pitched whine of a food mixer or a hairdryer, even a sneezing fit or a barking dog – it begins to intrude when it is directed straight at you.

I shudder when I see apartments which share a balcony, each space delineated by a glass screen or a wall. Often that screen doesn’t extend fully to the roof. It means that sound floats out of one apartment, echoes along the ceiling before skipping over the partition into the next door apartment. A conversation on one person’s balcony is transmitted along to all the others. It could so easily have been eliminated if the screen had simply been made full height, floor to ceiling, stopping noise from moving sidewards.

a balcony divider offering privacy but no sound protection

And it’s not only about external sounds. For years in London I suffered from the noise of my neighbour upstairs, thanks to the poor way an old house had been refashioned into several flats. It wasn’t that my neighbour was particularly noisy, just that there was virtually no sound insulation between their floor and my ceiling. An early night for me was out of the question if they were up late watching television. The scuffling sound of their dog’s excited scampering often woke me. Of course it worked the other way, too, and I cringe when I imagine what they heard coming out from my flat. Before that, I lived in a modern apartment which had concrete floors/ ceilings. There, the sound of a chair being dragged across the tiled kitchen floor above my bedroom was like nails on a blackboard.

When one of Australia’s most feted architects, Harry Seidler, designed an apartment building in Sydney in the 1990s, people rushed to live in the swankiest tower in town, with its fabulous views over the harbour. Almost immediately there were complaints and one of the main ones concerned the lack of sound insulation between apartments. The most intimate sounds were being transmitted with a beautiful clarity. In short, people had paid a fortune to hear their neighbours’ daily toileting regime.

It’s just another reason why I love Le Corbusier. His work has a particular sensitivity towards sound and privacy. Look at his Frugès development of the 1920s and you notice how a shared roof terrace is cleaved in two by a full-height wall and a canopy roof that directs sound away from each side. The sound of people socialising on one roof terrace doesn’t intrude on those sitting on the adjacent roof terrace. Compare that to an image from the baugruppen talk where individual roof terraces were placed atop a row of apartments, supposedly to give private space to each dwelling. Each of the narrow roof terraces was separated from its neighbour by a low wall, giving no privacy or noise protection. (I imagine sitting there, to enjoy my coffee in the winter sun, perhaps, when my next-door neighbour arrives to sit on her terrace to do the same. Two metres away. “Good morning,” she says to me. “Sod off,” is what I’d feel like saying. )

the separated roof terraces of the joined ‘skyscraper’ style houses at Pessac

Each of Le Corbusier’s apartments in the Unité d’habition in Marseille is surrounded by an airpocket so that it shares no walls with its neighbours, thereby reducing the transference of sound. Isn’t that the sign of a humane architect? This was decades ago and still we don’t seem to have learned to incorporate ideas like this.

Maybe it’s unfashionable to talk about sound. It’s curmudgeonly and saying that one doesn’t want to hear one’s neighbours can seem anti-social, or it speaks of entitlement and privilege, where only the very wealthy can afford to put distance between them and the noise of the hoi polloi. It speaks of a dainty constitution, like the Catherine Tate character who shrieks at any sudden noise, such as a toaster popping up. And yet to my mind, the containment or reduction of noise is a civilising thing. Peace is surely something that is enjoyed by everyone if they are given the chance, even teenagers.

I’m not talking about eliminating the ambient sounds of everyday life but about reducing them when it’s possible. And thoughtful design does that. We don’t have to turn up the music to block out the intrusive sound of the neighbours if sound insulation is present or windows properly placed. And that surely means that we feel nourished by the independence of our own living space where we set the noise level. For me, that means I’m in a far better mood to face the greater community outside, to open my ears and listen with a gentle heart. Not curmudgeonly in the slightest.

What’s your experience of noise in the home?

*Link to baugruppen images

the ultimate peace

Do you reckon you’d feel different if you’d been called something else? I mean, if you’d been called Benedict instead of Brian, or Mary instead of Andromeda? Do you think that a different name would make you see the world through different eyes?

Names always mean something but those meanings are moveable feasts. For my Scottish parents, Colin was a good Scottish name, Gaelic for Nicholas, but in England, where we lived, it was the name chosen in television dramas for the witless simpleton who worked in a warehouse. People call me Col in Australia, where every name has to be shortened. And in France, tins of colin line supermarket shelves and so a French friend insisted on calling me Hake. I never liked my name. When I was young, I rather fancied being called Justin, or Dominic, and I wonder how that might’ve been.

Do names really matter?

They do to novelists. Getting the names of your characters right is very important. Would you believe an Oxford academic called Taylee-Maree or a factory worker called Octavius unless there was a pretty compelling backstory to explain those choices? The main character in a thriller or a crime novel needs the right-sounding name. They tend to be rather blunt – think of Mike Hammer, Sam Spade, Jason Bourne, even Nancy Drew. My friend Victoria Blake’s feisty private investigator is called Sam Falconer, a name with strong consonants and an image of hunting down prey.  There are exceptions, of course. Would someone call their private dick Ellery Queen today except with a knowing wink? Or Sherlock Holmes? Names are no less important in other genres. Iris Murdoch, for instance, gave her solid, dependable women names like Hilda and Harriet.

Memorable characters tend to have great names: Heathcliff; Mr Pickwick; Anna Madrigal; Holden Caulfield; Scout. I defy anyone to say Jean Brodie without rolling that rrrr. Sheridan did a fabulous job with Sneerwell, Snake and Backbite but while that worked a treat in the eighteenth century, it’s a rather tired device today. My heart sinks when I open a novel and find characters with absurd names. If someone is called Bumfutter then there’s a good chance the book they’re appearing in is going to be pretty dire. A ‘comical’ name in a book is as delusional as the person who tells you they’ve got a really good sense of humour. Films do it, too, like ‘Meet the Fockers’.

There are exceptions but they’re probably personal. Viv Stanshall’s Sir Henry of Rawlinson End and Scrotum, the wrinkled retainer, still makes me laugh. And then that genteel comedy duo, Flanders and Swann, came up with the perfect English name: Emily Butter. How wholesome and sweet and pure she sounds. But wouldn’t a novelist have fun exploring her dark side (as nutty as burnt butter)!

In ‘Not Always To Plan’ I wrote about a family spurred into action by a surprise legacy. They’d been pottering along, a little lost, not really thinking of where life was headed. So I called them the Dormans, thinking of dormice (small world, fast asleep for half the year). I wanted them to be relatable, rather ordinary middle-class folk, and so I chose unremarkable names. Hence Ruth was married to Tom, and they had two children, Ryan and Natasha (I thought Ruth, an avid reader, would have fallen for the romantic connotations of something like Natasha). The names encapsulated the kind of people I was writing about – stolid Ruth, dependable Tom, that kind of thing. Other names were chosen because they were names I heard regularly, and as the novel was set in the suburb in which I live, I knew what sounded right.

With ‘Loving Le Corbusier’, I didn’t have to worry about names because every character except one was based on a real-life person. And yet it took a while to decide on the name for this exception, who was Yvonne Le Corbusier’s pal when she first arrived in Paris in 1918. I went through lists of the most popular names in France at the beginning of the 20^th century and ended up with Lisette, because it sounded as pert as I’d imagined this down-to-earth beauty to be. But what if I’d called her Clothilde or Hortense instead? Would it have mattered? Perhaps not, except to a French reader who might attach different meaning to those names.

In researching the life of Le Corbusier, it was fascinating to discover just how many people had changed their name in the early twentieth century. Of course I knew that Le Corbusier’s real name was Charles-Edouard Jeanneret-Gris, but even his wife Yvonne had been born Jeanne and changed it at some point. Jean Badovici had Italianised his name from the Romanian, Badoviso.  I kept tripping over others of the period who had done the same thing, too.

We think nothing of film stars changing their names although it’s charming to discover Diane Keaton’s real surname is Hall.  Vin Diesel sounds much more macho than Mark Sinclair, who sounds more like a software designer than an action hero. As kids we laughed our heads off when we discovered John Wayne’s real name was Marion. In the past, many changed their surname to fit in, to sound less alien, and in some cases less Jewish, like Samuel  Gelbfisz (Goldfish) becoming Sam Goldwyn, and Ralph Lifshitz becoming Ralph Lauren. And of course singers are always changing their names, although some, like Madonna and Kylie, have managed to turn their own into something like a trademark.

I know a few people whose names would be perfect in novels. Some, like mine, will only ever see the cover and never the contents.

What are your favourite names from novels?

People used to joke that when your plane landed at Auckland airport, they announced: “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to New Zealand, please put your watches back twenty years.” And yet it was Australia that felt like that to me when I first arrived in 1997. It was the cars, mainly. I hadn’t seen so many cars from the 1960s and 1970s on the road since, well, the 1960s and the 1970s. But there they were, all shiny and new-looking, plastic upholstery a-gleamin’ in the sunshine. I felt I’d slipped back in time.

And so nobody blinked an eye when we bought a 1974 Mazda Capella. We named her Beryl because her bright yellow paintwork was as bright and breezy as a sundress. She had a metal sun visor across the top of the windscreen which made me think of a French nun’s winged headpiece, so maybe she should really have been Bernadette. She was a total dog to drive but it was hard not to smile as we loped along the road.

The archetypal Australian car at that time was a Holden or Ford with big six- or eight-cylinder engines. Coming from the UK, where a car with a 2-litre engine was seen as a bit racy, I thought it would be fun to have one of those monsters. These were the last days of cheap petrol and mindless fuel consumption and I loved my Holden Commodore with its 3-litre engine although I wasn’t quite so smitten with the 4-litre Ford that followed it, even if I enjoyed the effortless surge of power when I put my foot down.

Even as a toddler, I obviously enjoyed sitting in the back of the family car at home…

The cars that I’ve owned might not make it apparent that I’ve always loved cars. It’s an interest I keep relatively quiet about, like my love for film music, mainly because others don’t seem to understand it. Especially my partner. If he hires a car when he’s away for work, I’ll ask him what sort it is and he’ll say, “Blue.”

A bad car made worse: an Austin Allegro with a Vanden Plas snout (image thanks to Mic/ Flickr)

I spent many happy hours as a child sitting in the back seat of my parents’ car, eyes glued to the road ahead, spotting the things that mattered. Like what made a car an LS and not a GLS (usually less chrome and plainer wheels). I spent time considering the ins and outs of the Austin Allegro’s square steering wheel, and felt a frisson of joy whenever I spotted exotic machines like the NSU Ro80 or Citroen SM. I even had a letter published in CAR magazine complaining about the lack of faces on modern cars (circa 1976) although I haven’t the foggiest why I signed it Cohen de Bizet.

an Austin Princess in its rightful place
(image thanks to Riley/ Flickr)

My interest was always about the look of the car, never the mechanicals. I despaired at how British car makers got it so wrong so often, adding clumsy details or making the windows too small. When France gave us streamlined cars like the Citroen GS and CX, Britain offered potato wedges like the frightful Austin Princess. There were exceptions, of course, but mainly in the upper echelons of car production, and a convertible Jensen Interceptor would always make me drool.

As a teenager, I loved the idea of luxury, like armrests in the rear seat and pull-down tables and walnut-burr dashboards. Details thrilled me, like the way a Lancia had a curtain to pull across the rear window to shade passengers. Fabric seats seemed outrageously plush to someone who had spent his childhood sliding about on polished leatherette, although I do remember the crackly brushed nylon in our 1970s Peugeot that was every bit as nasty (and brown) as that sounds. Sunroofs gave me palpitations, and don’t mention alloy wheels…

Ever since that misspent youth, I’ve followed the car industry with interest. The car has always been a reflection of social times, from the Trabant in the old GDR to the current vogue for electric cars. The 1980s saw the proliferation of ‘world cars’ which demonstrated the arrival of the global village. It meant that a vehicle designed, say, in Germany by Opel might be given a few tweaks – a new nose, a different engine – to become a Chevrolet, a Vauxhall or a Holden in other world markets. That made the lumpy-custard British offerings look decidedly individual, and (almost) something to be cherished, although most were soon consigned to the grave.

By the mid-80s, the yuppie had arrived and young men with gelled hair drove GTI’s and BMWs (Beemers). There were superminis that were faster than Ferraris and suddenly Range Rovers didn’t look out of place on the King’s Road. The car became not only an expression of your wealth but a symbol of which tribe you belonged to. Were you a Volvo person (seen as caring and safe) or were you  a Toyota person (seen as brand-blind and careful with the pennies)?

channelling my inner Italian

Style-wise, the 1990s was a rather limp period with lots of weak-chinned, jelly-mould cars but when the new century dawned, things perked up. Cars looked determinedly different from each other –  Fiats reclaimed Italian style, BMWs knitted their headlamp brows to prove the brand was the ultimate driving machine, and numerous little oddities livened up the scene, ranging from the twerky little Ford Ka (a hint of the old Citroen 2CV) to a Bentley that made little boys (i.e. most men) go ‘cor!’ again.

We’re currently in the SUV period where no one thinks it’s the least bit odd to drive around in something the size of an old Ford Transit. Even with a shift towards the electric motor, style remains everything. With all the shiny paintwork, huge wheels, and blinding LED lights, it’s increasingly difficult to tell whether a car is a bog-standard Hyundai or a pricey Maserati.

Cor?

The reason I’m dwelling on cars is that I feel like a change. My VW has been reliable and does everything with minimal fuss but I never walk back to it in the car park and think: gosh, that’s stunning. It’s got more gadgetry than my teenage self would ever have imagined possible (no curtains, though) but its lack of gorgeousness is keenly felt. It’s hard to know what to replace it with. And as I ponder that, I’m beginning to realise that I don’t really like cars so much nowadays. They’re all so blingy and blobby. They might turn my head for five minutes but I’m soon bored again.

Pure class… Citroen DS
(image thanks to Gintaras Rumsas/ Flickr)

So maybe it’s no surprise that, when I really think about it, the car I would most love to own is one from the past – a Citroen DS. That car stunned the world when it first appeared in 1955 and made me sigh with pleasure whenever I spied one as we drove through France in the 1970s. It still looks utterly gorgeous, which is why advertisers plonk them in ads for everything from jewellery to perfume. It might not have heated seats or be able to park itself but if I could only put back the clock twenty years, I’m sure I’d be able to snap up a real beauty.

Do cars matter to you?

I had a meeting recently in a particularly lovely space. The office was in one of Sydney’s old warehouses and it felt fabulous. There were high ceilings, plenty of windows drawing in oodles of light and lots of solid wood (columns, beams, floors). The stylish chairs and sofas were covered in one of my favourite materials, wool, all in soft greys and reds. Lighting was discreet. It all screamed quality.

On my way home, I kept thinking what it was that had struck me so strongly, although maybe it’s clear from my description. And yet I’ve been in spaces that have looked similar and I haven’t felt the same thing. Why? Were the wooden floorboards narrower and of a cheaper wood?  Was the furniture more generic, the fabrics less appealing?

It made me wonder what exactly quality is. How do we recognise it? Or rather, how do we manage so often to overlook it? The answer, perhaps, is in that well-worn phrase: never mind the quality, feel the width. It was said of tailors in London who would push cheaper fabric to the customer to optimise their profit. (And it was the name of a creaky old TV sitcom about two East End tailors, one Jewish, the other Irish – I’m sure you can imagine the ‘humour’.)

Quality is not the same as style or taste and doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with money, either. Sure, that office space was expensively designed but someone else might have looked at the bare brick walls and thought them rather basic and in need of a good plastering. Others might prefer floral fabrics to felted-wool. To me, the quality was in the solidity of the materials, the lack of fakeness, the way things spoke for themselves. It’s that ‘honesty’ thing that Modernism always called for, where nothing pretends to be anything else. Something of quality gives you more than you expect. It makes you feel better. Quality gives quality to life.

the quality of honest structure

And yet we still fall for tricks, or at least for what is dished out to us.

Recently I was looking for a new jacket. It was surprisingly hard to find one that hadn’t been tweaked with manmade fibres or given a jazzy lining or some other little feature. I felt they were all designed to take my eye off the fact that they weren’t very good quality. It took me ages to find something plain and simple and made of good fabric. It wasn’t any more expensive than the others so it wasn’t even a case of ‘you get what you pay for’.

Fifteen years ago I was given a Giorgio Armani tee shirt. There was nothing but a tiny label sewn inside the neck, no big logo on the chest. I had always thought that ‘designer’ clothes were a bit of a swizz but that tee shirt taught me a great deal about quality. It’s something of a marvel. Despite being worn umpteen times over so many years, the fabric remains soft and strong and looks like new if I can be bothered to iron it. It’s kept its shape and has never pilled. In the meantime, I’ve gone through any number of cheap tee shirts which lost shape, whose fabric wore out, and whose stitching came apart. Old Giorgio just keeps going on. Why? Because it’s beautifully made from high quality fabric. Lesson learned (or at least noted, because I still find myself unable to splurge that much on a new tee shirt.)

the quality of generous space

The idea of quality is in everything.

• The quality of space – when a door or a passageway is wider than usual or a room has a higher ceiling than usual, the quality is generosity. Mean spaces at the top of stairs or just inside entrance doors give you a niggly feeling and usually say much about the quality of the rest of a building.
• The quality of good conversation – someone who listens to you and remarks and questions what you say, versus someone who only uses your words as a springboard for their own thoughts and observations. Don’t you feel uplifted after a ‘quality’ conversation with one person, rather than drained by empty-calorie chatter with another?
• The quality of writing – good story-telling shows time has been spent over it, the element of crafting. Good writing is apparent in everything from high literature to potboilers, and it’s very apparent when it’s not there. Don’t you feel let down by lazy writing, and having wasted your time over a badly done novel?

  the quality of good writing

• Leather upholstery in a car used to be a sign of a quality motor. Today it’s usually the cheapest cars that have fabric seats although the leather in many cars, including in upmarket brands, is often fake pleather. That’s not for any moral reason, trying to cut down the number of cows needed so that their methane doesn’t affect global warming, but more about replicating the real effect cheaply. It’s simply the fake Rolex going mainstream and becoming acceptable, and it’s everywhere.
• The quality of restaurant food that has been cooked with care rather than cooked quickly and put on a plate (or a wooden board/ slate/ boot, etc) with lots of tiny dabs of this and that to make it appear interesting. Never mind the quality if there’s so much of it, too.

  the quality of simple food, beautifully presented

• The quality of a building which does things that surprise and delight you, rather than just exactly what you expect. I’m thinking of Le Corbusier’s apartments in Marseille, with so many thoughtful touches that make life easier and more pleasurable (steps to sit on, stairs to cling to, knobs to hang pans on). I’m also thinking of the rash of new houses rising in so many Australia towns which have lots of odd shapes and materials to take your eye off the fact they’re cheaply built and poorly planned. The same budget spent on something simpler that is tailored to real life demands would surely be better. We’ve fallen for open-plan when that’s often code for cost-cutting – fewer walls and no doors might be cheaper to build but it makes for more ambient noise and a less liveable environment. So maybe quality is a room with a door.

  the quality of simple architecture

• The quality of good design – like the Braun calculator that looked beautiful (it inspired the first iPhone) and did everything it was meant to in a pleasing way – nice buttons, clear display, good to hold. It’s what drew people to Apple, after all, because things looked beautiful and worked seamlessly most of the time. I remember changing a headlamp globe on my old Saab and how simple and easy it was. I did the same on a Ford and cut my hand to ribbons. The idea of good design extending beyond what is visible is a clear sign of quality. I admit some of it does tend to add cost. But not always. And that’s the thing that baffles me. When something is popular then it becomes cheaper to manufacture. IKEA used to do it, using proper wood instead of plastic veneers, but even that has changed.

  the quality of thoughtful design

• The emoji – pick a symbol that sums up a mood or a comment. Quick and easy. But drawn by someone else and therefore de-personalised. Are actual words going to become out-dated?

The list goes on. Don’t you think it’s time for a revival in the quality of quality?

So what does quality mean to you?

the quality of order

Ingvar Kamprad founded IKEA in 1943 and died recently at the age of 91. Last week I was invited to chat on the radio about his life and the impact of IKEA on our lives (you can hear the interview here). I was surprised after the announcement of his death by the number of rather snooty articles about IKEA. Design writer Olly Wainwright cocked his snook in The Guardian at the top 10 sellers; others sniggered about allen keys, arguments over self-assembly, flatpack coffins, and panic attacks in the IKEA maze. Moderately funny, of course, but the general feeling I had was that people thought IKEA was not all that great. Which surprised me because I think IKEA is brilliant.

I remember my first visit to its new London store in 1988. I had just bought my own flat in Greenwich and was in dire need of all kinds of things. To get to the store in Wembley was quite a trek so I hoped it would be worthwhile. It was, in fact, a revelation. Not knowing what to expect, I was amazed to discover so many things that I liked and, more importantly, that I could afford. I sauntered through its room sets with a stupid grin on my face and then fought my way through the busy Market Hall, discovering things I hadn’t realised I needed. Bumper packs of paper napkins? Yes please! Scrunchy bags of tea lights? Why not! A dinky set of sherry glasses? Ja, tack! By the time I’d finished, the back of my poor little Ford Fiesta was stuffed to the brim with various bags plus a folding dining table in modish black-stained beech, a pine plant stand, a green glass lamp and a variety of hooks.  And I was as happy as Larry (or perhaps Laurentius, given I was so totally taken with the Swedish vibe).

It’s easy to forget now that in 1988 it all felt so different from what was generally available. There was Habitat, which was youthful and design-conscious but not always cheap, and the basic homewares at stores like John Lewis  were boringly traditional. You could pick up cheap stuff in places like Do-It-All or BHS but it looked cheap, too. IKEA was a breath of fresh air. It felt bright and breezy and full of optimism, as sunny as a Timotei shampoo ad. Over the years I have bought oak picture frames, umpteen lamps (some of which I didn’t actually need), various window blinds, numerous vases, dinner plates and jugs, and myriad bits and bobs for the kitchen. (Doesn’t everyone have one of those IKEA metal potstands sitting next to their cooker?) It became my first port of call whenever I needed something basic, well designed and fundamentally appealing.

Part of that appeal was its ability to blend in so well with other things – a funky little side table next to a traditional leather Chesterfield was no problem. Neither was a pine clock on the kitchen wall nor a diaphanous linen curtain at the window for privacy. The chunky water glasses on the dining table were as satisfying as classic Duralex. Much later, having moved to Australia and during a brief career crossroads, I bought a heap of things to dress up the respite house I ran for people with intellectual disabilities. The kids loved the heart-shaped velour cushions that had arms like 1960s gonks, hugging them the moment they arrived. The colourful plastic plates and beakers were perfect for picnics, especially if someone was upset and decided to throw everything around the place.

Flickr CC _e.t.

So why the distain?

I think it’s the ubiquity. Glance through Airbnb online and you notice how many people have furnished their flats and rooms for rent with the same IKEA items, whether they’re in Rome or Rio. Every student household is filled with IKEA. Millennials grew up with IKEA nursery chairs then desks and wardrobes. Some might even have been weaned on IKEA meatballs. IKEA claims one in ten Europeans was conceived in an IKEA bed. Ubiquity breeds contempt.  The fact that Ingvar wanted everything they sold to be recogniseably IKEA means people always know exactly where it comes from.  It’s a look, whether it’s a waste paper bin or a sofa. To be honest, I think the quality of some items has fallen, like the oak frames now replaced by fake wood. There’s also the matter of old Ingvar’s dubious right-wing political beliefs as a young man which makes people feel a bit iffy about the brand.

For evangelical me, though, I think of IKEA as the company that had same-sex couples in its adverts, that promoted energy-saving LED light bulbs before others did, and that named the designer of every item, no matter how humble the object. It’s classless and classic. And it’s a surely a marvel that I’m still tempted into buying paper-covered wheels of Swedish crispbread every time I visit. So yes, I’m the one whose face lights up at the sight of the huge yellow and blue warehouse on the horizon. If they only made a Cölin chair I’d be in heaven…

Perhaps that means I’ve fallen so much for the sunshine that I can’t see the shadow. But if old Ingvar has followed the prescribed route and made it all the way through to the Pearly Gates, I for one would like to say a big tack så mycket (which is thank you very much in Swedish, not the name of a new line of flatpack chairs).

Are you an Ikea lover or hater?