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When I wrote the last of my Hearth Goddess columns in November, I was whistling in the dark. The cosy cot at the other end of my road into which I had planned to downsize had soared out of my price range. But I had decided to go ahead with the sale of the family house we had lived in for 22 years. Lots of cash then – but no home. Nor did there seem any prospect of finding one before the spring. Weary smiles greeted my proud announcement to the North Oxford estate agents that I was a ‘genuine cash buyer’. Too many loaded Londoners with children signed up for Oxford schools were chasing the few houses they had. Once I had paid off my mortgage and allowed for stamp duty and moving expenses, it seemed unlikely that I would be able to afford a house big enough for the whole family to visit at the same time.
Time for lateral thinking. With my four girls well into their twenties, I didn’t need to be near Oxford High any more. North Oxford has undoubted attractions, but it is changing fast. Hundreds of scaled-down imitations of its spacious redbrick semis and terraces are being squashed into every available space. The big gardens and the river and canal side wildernesses are disappearing under concrete and the water table is rising: houses once merely damp in the rainy season are now regularly waterlogged. Parking restrictions are in force everywhere, and the narrower streets are clogged with cars. Smart eateries are replacing the real shops. Suppose I looked further afield?
I let my eyes stray from the glamorous colour ads of the Summertown branches estate agents. The grey, smudged face of a generously-gabled double-fronted house in west Oxford peeped humbly out of a postage-stamp size advert. Its price seemed too good to be true, and it was attractively close, though not too close, to the Hearth God’s interestingly turbulent cave. I went over to look at it on a sunny afternoon in late November. It was love at first sight, reinforced into obsession by the time we had explored its rambling interiors and jungle of a garden. Against all the current received wisdom, I offered the asking price and had it accepted there and then. It would have been an insult to do anything else.
My favourite chapter in Kipling’s Autobiography is his description of how he and his wife first found Bateman’s, the Sussex house (now owned by the National Trust) that became their family home, and whose setting Kipling immortalised in such poems as ‘The Way Through the Woods’ and that most English of books, Puck of Pook’s Hill. ‘We reached her down a rabbit-hole of a lane. At very first sight the Committee of Ways and Means said: “That’s her! The Only She! Make an honest woman of her – quick!” We entered and felt her Spirit – her Feng Shui – to be good. We went through every room and found no shadow of ancient regrets, stifled miseries, nor any menace’. Kipling called that chapter ‘The Very-Own House’, and though such baby-talk is a touch fey for modern tastes, I knew why it had jumped to mind. This was in truth the first time in my life that I had chosen a house for myself alone.
I am sure that I have done the right thing, but what I have chosen has been something of a shock for family and friends. Instinct had over-turned reason. Instead of down-sizing, I have up-sized-down. By abandoning that tired old adage ‘location, location, location’, I have acquired, for two-thirds of the price of my old house, a third as much space again: a detached house with three thousand square ft of floor space set in two-thirds of an acre of garden. It is not a conventionally beautiful house. Its core is circa 1912, with Minton tiles in the hall, arts and crafts window-seats in the front rooms and three bedrooms. Its kitchen was opened up and extended in the 1960s with pine ceilings and arches into a sunken dining area with sliding picture windows onto the garden. Its utility rooms were converted into an extra sitting room downstairs, an upstairs study with huge modern windows on three sides, an extra bedroom over the kitchen and a vast loft, opened up with velux rooflights and a staircase.
Yet the more I have thought about it, the better my snap decision has seemed. Instead of drawing in my horns, I have spread my wings. I’ve chosen a home for the person I am now: at a turning point of life, no longer responsible for my children and still with plenty of energy to follow new enthusiasms. Here there is space to make things. I have a sunny little sewing-room, and a double garage soon to be fitted out for working on sailing dinghies. The Hearth God is planning all manner of marvels in a well-fitted glass-roofed workshop which is attached to the house.
Not that being a parent ever ends. Families as large and fond of each other as ours need a hub where they can gather when they want to celebrate or need a comfort zone in adversity. Up-sizing-down so dramatically means that I will also be able to give my daughters a financial leg-up the property ladder and something for their weddings and still set something by for my old age. And there’s a new generation on the way: my first grandchild is expected in September. Soon we’ll be redecorating the doll’s house, implanting a new mane into the rocking horse, and designing a tree-house.
This is a time when old friends are coming free –taking new directions which means that they work from home, working part-time, retiring. Now I can ask them to stay for weekends the way we used to do when we were child-free in our twenties. Browsing in a life-style magazine in the hairdressers, I came upon positive endorsement for expanding with age rather than contracting. A property guru was commenting on the growing demand from babyboomers who have cashed in on their absurdly-priced city-centre houses for homes with space to entertain in – preferably near regional airports and with good motorway access. Barn conversions, one-time chapels and old farm-houses can offer unconventional living at a time of life when it can be enjoyed to the full. Thanks to the internet and the mobile phone, nowhere needs feel remote these days. ‘Houses are the domain of slowly shifting fantasies and rapidly shifting needs’ writes Stewart Brand in his subtle exploration of architectural change, How Buildings Learn. ‘More space is equated with more freedom’.
West Oxford may not have the cachet of North Oxford, but it has a great many conveniences. The charmingly retro Elms Parade five minutes from my door offers post-office, library, bank, a co-op, an excellent Italian restaurant and a fine butcher. When I go for a walk, I can traipse up the Cumnor hills like Matthew Arnold’s ‘Scholar Gipsy’. Nor am I much further by bike from the city centre than I used to be.
After almost a year of lying empty (a developer had tried and failed to get permission to pull the house down), the very-own house had become understandably disheveled. But her bones are good, with the surveyor positively complimentary. In the summer she will have a leaky chimney-stack repaired, new gutters and fresh paint all over her shabby stucco and peeling woodwork. Meanwhile daughters and their swains have taken time off work to set to with paint-brushes indoors. Bookshelves are being built on every available wall. I’ve installed a new boiler and new radiators and a claret-coloured Aga to warm the kitchen/living room.
But I’ve done much less than I originally planned. Instinct made me leave my furniture in store and just camp in the house with a few basics, and the longer I did so, the more I understood why it was as it was. Presenting awards for the Architectural Association in 1924, Winston Churchill said ‘We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us’. I can already feel that happening. This is a quirky house with a mind of its own. It has an old red telephone box in the middle of the lawn and a foxes’ earth at the end of the garden. There are small doors in the loft leading into nether attics that I still haven’t fully explored. It invites a new way of managing domesticities, casual and unfussy. Adventure is afoot.
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