Ty'r Arfordir: "The Coast House"

Keith & Chad exemplify these qualities, and their hillside home in far West Pembrokeshire overlooking Fishguard and the Irish Sea is one of the more spectacularly-sited homes I’ve covered. It appears in the current (May 2012) issue of Build It magazine.

All the self-build projects I’ve covered, going back nearly ten years now, have impressed me – or rather, the people who undertake the projects impress me first of all, then I’m usually impressed by the house itself subsequently.

Keith & Chad had cherished the idea of building their own home for longer than most, in fact Keith has retired from his career in air traffic control while Chad still works in graphic design. They’re far from being the oldest self-builders I’ve known: I featured a lady in Buckinghamshire who finally built herself a striking modernist home, at the age of 81! But since the process is universally acknowledged as very demanding for those new to building, and wearing to the spirit even for youngsters, it is commendable when people well into middle age take on something like this.

A suggestion of the views enjoyed by Keith & Chad

All the more so when they don’t go for the sort of bog-standard bungalow that blights suburbia by the hundreds of thousands.

The couple had lived in Hampshire, ditched their first architect, and hooked up with Mick O’Connor of Squirrel Design in Devon, but they finally bought a plot in Pembrokeshire – where Chad mostly grew up and retained family connections. One thing they learned was that building on a steep slope is more expensive than on the level! Plus the ground is solid rock… But Mick’s dramatic design makes the most of its sloping site, and of the elevated situation: the views are sweeping, bold, inspiring. From their main semi-open living area, from the master bedroom, and from the balcony which was a “must have” here, they look out onto a rolling Welsh landscape to their right, and the Irish Sea to the left.

If I lived there, I’d find it hard to concentrate on anything with such views to distract me! It’s why they located their office space at the back of the house…

modernist architecture looks great at dusk...

I’d set everything up well in advance, with a solid commission from a good title, and I’d already visited the house twice – shooting the initial recces, then again to clarify some points about the feature. I don’t leave things to chance, too many variables, too many things to go wrong when one is juggling homeowners’ expectations, magazine requirements, weather, last minute upsets, often a long journey to reach the house. But there’s no accounting for people.

Most of those whose homes I’ve featured have been lovely: by definition, if they’re happy to be featured in a national title, named, photographed, their home depicted in detail, people are most likely outgoing and confident, friendly and welcoming – I’ve been accommodated overnight in some very fine homes, wined & dined, treated like a guest. However…

When the front door opened we sensed immediately a certain tension, cause unknown. We were invited in; we chatted desultorily, but the lady of the house seemed distracted, on edge, and rushed off to the living room where she carried on making up the fire – I’d said in advance that I’d do pics with and without a fire going and that I’d deal with it myself. I tried to remind her it wasn’t necessary, a temporary blaze was fine, no need for a real fire, especially on a sunny summer’s day. She turned excitable and shrill: this was her house, she wanted a “proper” fire which would be much better than my silly plan, and she wasn’t going to be told otherwise… We retreated to start getting some kit together. Then, rashly – or in retrospect fortuitously – I showed m’lady the latest issue of the (very respectable) title that had commissioned the feature. She leafed through it impatiently, muttering, and said she didn’t want to be in this magazine – surely her Superior Home should be in a Nice Magazine, a Proper Magazine, one of the Best Magazines read by her friends. Yes, she spoke in capital letters… My attempts at explaining the impossibility of picking and choosing magazines, and the extreme competition for space in the top two or three titles, fell on deaf ears, merely provoking m’lady to fresh fits of pettishness. Judy was getting impatient: I could see her eyes flashing as her smile became increasingly strained, fierce… I had a sense of forboding, wondering whether to press on or not. M’lady’s husband hovered nearby, clearly embarrassed by what he recognised as familiar behaviour, wringing his hands ineffectually.

In short order, we walked, after a brief whispered conversation to agree that even if we continued, m’lady’s weird behaviour meant she’d throw another wobbly eventually. So we cut our losses and carried the kit back to the car, accompanied by m’lady, now shamefaced and apologetic but unwilling to change her mind about the fire or the magazine.

Over coffee in town, we slandered her mercilessly and commiserated at the financial loss and waste of our time; Judy said it was just as well we’d left before she hit the woman. I pondered the professional embarrassment entailed in telling the magazine it was all off. In fact they were good about it – they know such things happen occasionally.

As I said, most people are great to deal with, fully appreciative of the work that goes into a feature and flattered that a magazine wants to spread pictures of their home across several pages. This was the worst situation of its type I’ve had to deal with, very untypical. Still rankles, though….

(Sorry, no pictures of this place – for obvious reasons.)

But recently I’ve been networking with a few bathroom suppliers, seeking fresh leads to potential feature homes, and the topic arose in conversation. People running all manner of bathroom businesses, including some very upmarket suppliers indeed, have been telling me that bidets are still comparatively unusual in the UK.

Mallorca bidet: fitted as a matter of course into a Brit-owned apartment in Palma

It surprises me – though on reflection, even the sort of homes I feature are not universally equipped with bidets: off the top of my head maybe 40% at most of the homes I’ve featured (or at least, when I’ve done specific bathroom features, for the kbb titles) have had a bidet. Even the superior one-off new-build homes that I feature for Build It and other titles, don’t always have bidets – and such homes are invariably put together by people who are not necessarily wealthy but who are well informed, determined, have a good eye for design, décor and style, and don’t skimp on the fixtures & fittings. They’re also very good at researching the market, and sourcing things from all over – one couple I interviewed drove back from Holland with five WCs on the Volvo’s roofrack, having found a particular model for much less than they were here! – but they don’t necessarily fit a bidet…

I’ve just been talking to my friend Judy who does the styling on some of my house shoots. She bought a house in Puglia which she’s slowly doing up, so I asked about bidets.

“In my Italian house I have a bidet in the downstairs bathroom,” she explained. “But when doing a new bathroom I decided to save a bit of cash and not have a bidet. One local Italian friend was shocked… no bidet!! She told me that I’d never be able to sell the house to an Italian if there was a bathroom with no bidet…They wouldn’t care at all if there were no bath, but the lack of a bidet was unthinkable.”

Bidet installation in an unfinished UK bathroom: untypical?

I have limited experience of bathrooms in North America or other continents; I’ve seen many bathrooms in France and Germany, plus a few in Mediterranean countries, where bidets are certainly more common than in Britain. So is an aversion to the bidet – or simply a lack of interest – just an Anglo Saxon thing? My teenage son finds them embarrassing: he thinks his friends would find it weird if they knew we had a bidet! So just how typical a Brit is he, I wonder…

I’m often asked how I find feature homes, and the answer is networking – plus luck. The owners of a lovely old Devon house that I was shooting for 25 Beautiful Homes said in passing, “You really should meet our artist friend Lydia. She lives just down the road…” So I drove a few miles to Lydia’s village. She was charming, and it wasn’t her house there that intrigued me so much as her other home – in France. Not just the house either, but more importantly, her background…

Sylvette's French home

Born Sylvette David in France, to an English mother and a French father (she re-Christened herself Lydia but for clarity I’ll stay with Sylvette) she was brought up in Southern France, and as a beautiful 19-year-old was introduced to Pablo Picasso in Vallauris. The rest is art history. Picasso was very taken with Sylvette, produced a great deal of work – drawings, sculptures, paintings – and his Paris exhibition in autumn 1954 thrust “the girl with a ponytail” onto the world artistic stage.

Typical of the exposure Sylvette received: magazine spread

Sylvette became a celebrity across Europe: I’ve seen the press cuttings, indeed I urged her to let me digitise them for security. From Stockholm to the Riviera she was written about, photographed, celebrated as Picasso’s great find – and with her looks she became almost as celebrated as the great man himself.

I’d never met anyone who’d known Picasso, let alone someone who modelled for him, and I’m unlikely to do so again. I thought this connection alone should sell the feature, and it did so readily. The Telegraph Magazine said yes – then got snotty about wanting their own photographer to shoot the pictures, which of course was unacceptable to me. Fortunately their loss was The Guardian Weekend’s gain: they snapped it up and were perfectly happy for me to do the full feature.

(Aside: features like these are nearly always done by a separate writer & photographer. I’m a bit unusual in doing the full package myself. Most home-interest editors find this convenient, but newspapers are more conservative and tend to doubt that one person can do both effectively. I’ve never had complaints about either my photography, or my writing…)

studio, with paintings by Sylvette's mother

France is delightful to drive across but it’s big: I usually take the train. So I caught the Eurostar to Lille, then the wonderful TGV whisked me down to Avignon, where I stayed the night. A short drive north to Orange, then to the village that had been home to Sylvette’s father, art dealer Emmanuel David, whose house she inherited.

A vintage maison de mâitre, Quartier de la Garde had complex, quirky interiors that were a delight to photograph: unmodernised, its traditional furnishings and soft wooden-shuttered light, its generous dimensions, offered character by the bucketful. Many walls – even doors – sported paintings by Sylvette (an accomplished artist herself, who has exhibited in London) and by her mother Honor Gell from Wiltshire whose pre-WW2 portraits are striking. Sylvette had hospitably invited me to stay there, so I was able to produce far morephotographs than I would normally shoot, at all times of the day.

Lydia today, painting in her French home

Even more enjoyable than photographing this beautiful house was the experience of interviewing Sylvette, who didn’t actually grow up there: “Sadly, my mother and father divorced before I was born, and for many years I didn’t really know him apart from one occasion in my mid-teens. But his new wife didn’t like my coming here, so further contact was curtailed. I never really knew this house until 1963 when I was nearly thirty and had my first child, Isabelle.” As part of a bohemian upbringing, Sylvette lived with her mother in the naturist community of the Isle du Levant during the war years, and the teenage Sylvette attended A.S.Neil’s progressive Summerhill School in the early 1950s.

Pablo Picasso in 1954 shows his famous model her portrait

This was interesting in itself, but talking with her offered a view not just of Picasso, one of the 20thC’s most eminent artists, but of other lesser figures who were nevertheless prominent in popular culture. I was fascinated by her telling me that it was her father who suggested she wear her hair in that elevated ponytail style which Picasso liked so much – a style imitated by many young women, including Brigitte Bardot: “I passed by her on the Croisette during the Cannes Film Festival,” she recalls, “when she was accompanied by Roger Vadim, and they both looked at me…. Bardot went to see Picasso at one time, and wrote subsequently in her autobiography that she’d asked him to paint her, but he declined because he’d “already painted Sylvette David” and we looked as alike as two drops of water!” So much for BB…

Sylvette visits Picasso some years later - with her daughter

Later, Sylvette did advertising work, and nearly made it into film: Jacques Tati approached her in a Paris street, but by her own admission she was rather shy and dubious about the world of cinema. She managed one film appearance in “Visage d’une Autre” by Marie-Claire Schaeffer in 1961 – and a brief career as a model in London.  Her inheritance from the Picasso experience included a painting and a drawing, sold long ago: “I loved them, but they had to be sold to pay for my husband’s treatment when he fell ill – and I bought an apartment in Paris.” One wonders what those pictures might be worth now.

My feature duly appeared in The Guardian’s Weekend magazine supplement, and earned me some money. But it’s good to do things that offer additional rewards. Last weekend I was photographing a modest suburban bungalow. Then sometimes I get to meet people who’ve done very special things and make me feel as if I’m brushing up against history. I love my job.

Lydia Corbett, née Sylvette David

So for some years I’ve been meeting self-builders, interviewing them at length, discovering in great detail the facts & figures behind putting a house together (these feature articles are very strong on physical detail and actual costs), and of course photographing them inside and out.

Incidentally some people describe me as an architectural photographer, but this is a misnomer: I rarely work for architects, and shooting images to demonstrate pure architecture is specialised. I mainly photograph buildings it’s true; mostly this is interior work, showing off stylish domestic décor in the best possible light; when I shoot exteriors of self-build houses, I’m very often aiming to reveal the special qualities of the setting, in addition to the styling of the house itself.

Some think of a Huf Haus as stark, industrial, shed-like. They're mistaken: a Huf is comfortable, stylish, practical, tough as old boots - and beautiful.

Although people build new individual houses in a variety of styles – some of them not always terribly imaginative – the modernist ones I cover give me the most satisfaction. Sure, a medieval half-timbered place that’s been lovingly restored, perhaps with a moat, or a large wood-panelled dining hall (murder to photograph!) can be very charming and one is aware of the rich history behind this sort of house; but what I find uplifting is to be let loose on somewhere modernist, radical, uncompromising… I’ve been fortunate to have been able to put together features on some striking modern homes, in Germany, Wales, London, Ibiza, the Costa del Sol; I liked each of these very much indeed. However, although I see a great many houses, each of which is admirable in its way, there aren’t many I’d choose to live in myself.

So I’d already decided that if ever I had the chance to build my own home, I’d go for some form of “kit house” – mainly because I am thoroughly acquainted by now with the sheer hard work, stress and time that goes into building a house from scratch. The better providers of kit houses – and there’s a big selection – offer a high degree of customisation, which deals with most of one’s need for somewhere genuinely individual, a home of one’s own; and the kit concept makes for savings in money and time. A few years ago I featured a London architect’s self-build – and no, he didn’t design it from scratch himself, he specified how various options should go together, then the house was delivered in five artic-loads from Lithuania. It went up in about a week, with the aid of the biggest crane ever seen in East Dulwich!

This Huf Haus was intentionally built around a beautiful magnolia tree.

Modern kit-houses also tend to look, well, modern: and one of the most modern is the brand leader, Huf from Germany. I’ve admired the Huf Haus for years, not just the steep-pitched classic either, sort of Southern Germanic chalet-style on steroids, but the variety they offer; Huf is not a one-trick pony. Since I visit Germany for family reasons, I’d tried to make time to visit either the Huf show-home in Wuppertal,  or the Huf Village at Hartenfels, not far off the A3 Autobahn SE of Cologne; I didn’t get round to it before finally my opportunity came to cover a Huf Haus, in late 2010, via the UK PRs for Huf, Cohn & Wolfe; it was a flat-roofed design that took a while to confirm but I got there, did two shoots, and completed two features for KBB and Build It. Nice when that works out: no conflict between two such titles, different readerships, pictures, copy, and more cost effective for me! The features appeared in late summer 2011, and I was delighted with the treatment each title gave to my pictures, didn’t make the covers but lovely big DPS, multiple pages, and so on.

And becoming acquainted with this super Surrey house confirmed both my admiration for the way the Huf company works, the quality of its product – and my feeling that a Huf Haus would suit me down to the ground.

A Huf interior makes a superb set in which to create a super kitchen. This one also has Woody Allen's autograph! He visited, and spent two days filming - alas, this bit was cut from the final edit...

Huf seem to have been just as good to work with as their image suggests – lots of people saw that episode of Grand Designs about the Huf Haus in the Home Counties, and they all mention the business about the construction crew sweeping out their van after they’d finished – it’s all true! The Huf team proved invaluable in helping fix the initial planning difficulties, co-operated with custom features, and arranged to concentrate their deliveries at certain times to minimise disruption to neighbouring properties. Having one’s dream home custom designed by an architect is very, very appealing; but choosing a Huf Haus would not for me represent a compromise. The qualityand service are second to none. And they look wonderful.

Last week I was in Somerset visiting some impressive houses that will make magazine features. Next week, who knows… I don’t jet all over the place but my work has taken me to some interesting locations, sometimes at short notice. I’d probably never have seen Marrakech, but for a chance Internet encounter a few years ago.

total privacy, luxury, an enclosed world - it's what Westerners love about the riad lifestyle

As part of my regular schedule I’d been in contact with a lot of PR agencies, seeking leads to potential feature homes. Brett Gregory-Peake of Frank & Earnest replied with an email asking if I would like to be put in touch with Jimmy Boyle, who had a lovely riad in Marrakech. Being reasonably well informed I knew Jimmy’s name by repute: after an unconventional (little bit of euphemism there) early life in Glasgow he’d done fifteen years in Barlinnie, discovered sculpture through a prison visitor, followed his great natural talent after release, and never looked back. So as casually as I could I replied sure, why not…

After a phone call in which I reassured Jimmy that I had no interest in dragging up his past – being hounded by the press had driven him from Britain – he said yes, and I set about getting a commission to feature his renovated riad home in the Medina of Marrakech.

It wasn’t difficult. His place was eminently photogenic, but my fame within the world of editorial interiors photography didn’t sell the feature – no, it was the Boyle name. I was commissioned by The Guardian Weekend magazine for a full feature package.

Jimmy B

Met at Marrakech airport by Jimmy’s “gofer”, a delightful man named Fouad, I was taken to my hotel, then to the riad. Jimmy was very welcoming, and I met his equally charming partner Kate; over the next three days I shot the riad in depth, interviewed the pair about life in Marrakech, and saw the two other properties they owned. There was what they called a “villa”, which I’d describe as a small palace, still being completed – but they were selling that, since they’d found a farm a few miles out of town, which they showed me, wonderful place with acres of olive trees and fruit: tranquil, private, almost idyllic. That was going to be home. They love their life out there, and I wish them well, very open and hospitable people. (I wish I could afford to buy Jimmy’s striking sculptures, but I have to leave that to his international circle of well-heeled collectors…)

Marrakech itself? I’m in two minds. It’s been popular for a long time, first among the fashionable artistic crowd and jet-setters, more recently on the holiday circuit – and with people seeking a second home abroad that’s a bit more exotic than Brittany. It struck me as interesting but I confess to a degree of disappointment; it felt safe, with friendly people, and with the same surreal mix of squalour and high luxury as some other “exotic” destinations. My hotel was OK, nothing special, some distance from the souks and Jemaa El F’Naa; I discovered the Café de la Poste and drank a terrific espresso which made up for the rubbish coffee at my hotel.

rooftop terrace breakfasts in the sun - and an alien skyline of mosques & satellite dishes

I flew home after my worst ever airport experience: the computers had crashed and all booking-in had to be done by hand. Shoulder to shoulder crowds queued for hours; there was some hysteria; fights broke out… But my feature appeared, they used the pictures well, and my copy wasn’t too heavily subbed.

Later, I returned to Marrakech, after Jimmy had apparently mentioned me at a gathering of Brit expats: Grant Rawlings runs his business (chic-marrakech.com) there, as a facilitator and agent for Brits moving into the city, and he had some clients whose riad might suit my requirements, he thought.

despite my reservations about residency, I could get used to riad life...

Again things worked out. On the strength of some snapshots I was commissioned by 25 Beautiful Homes, I flew from Bristol to the super new Marrakech airport (vastly better – the computers worked), and the three Brits who jointly owned the large riad to be featured put me up there, very hospitably (www.timila.com)

Gorgeous décor, beautifully done, large and rambling, could accommodate a dozen or so comfortably, and it photographed very well. Being on site, I could shoot lots more images than otherwise, and instead of the bland fare of an hotel I enjoyed excellent dishes prepared by the resident cook. I had a great time, as good in its way as my first Marrakech trip; staying in the Medina itself showed me more of the city than I’d experienced on my first hotel-bound visit.

breakfast is served, riad style

But I still wouldn’t live there myself. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a very interesting city, one of those places like Katmandhu or Timbuctoo whose very name is redolent of an extra-European exoticism.  I understand the appeal for those who buy into it and spend so much time in Morocco – or base themselves there like Grant Rawlings, whose love of the local culture came across in a long conversation over coffee in the Café des Epices. It’s politically stable, though all those Europeans who’ve bought into Moroccan property must have been nervous during the “Arab spring” of 2011… I’d visit the city again tomorrow – would be delighted to see Morocco once more – and staying in a modernised riad is wonderfully relaxing, a little self-contained world of its own, with sunlit breakfasts on the roof terrace. But perhaps I feel more at home in Europe.

Where might I live? I’ll explore the possibilities in future blogs.