Open House

by Jane Christmas

  When did this man who I had been drawn to so instantly, who appeared when I was not looking for anyone, whose patient, effortless, easygoing nature and love of travel seduced me, abruptly change into cement shoes and refuse to be stirred by this adventure of renovating our own home? I want him to engage in the experience of renovating. I want him to share a bit of my passion. I want him to bond with this space and with me. I want this house to bridge the chasm between us.

  This morning, we perch on beige-canvas folding chairs in our new backyard and face the back of the house, with its dreary, beige, pebble-dash facade (which I see painted a crisp white or a pale grey). The backside of a Victorian terrace is not an attractive sight. The sun is bright, and the day is warming up, but all the same our hands are cupped around mugs of instant coffee, willing some spiritual warmth to melt our worries. Steam rises like inspiration, and I move my face closer to the cup to receive its heat and aroma. I broach the bonding aspect again.

  “What we need is something that will make us bond,” I say. “An experience. Something that we can be proud to look upon and say, “We did it.” We have done the Camino. We have done Machu Picchu. What we need is a house to renovate. Something where we can get stuck in. Work with our hands. A creative project.”

  The Husband looks at me as if I have been living all this time with another man. In addition to not being comfortable with change or moving house, he has zero ability or interest in anything to do with do-it-yourself. DIY is for another breed of male, whom he respects but with whom he has no fraternity. He will not so much as hang a painting. I wonder whether someone was overly critical of his efforts to make or repair something when he was a youngster, and that the sting forever put him off attempting it again. That said, he does enjoy shovelling snow and chopping firewood. Should have moved to Canada. His preferred domain is a café, preferably small, independently owned and not patronized by people with crying infants in tow, where he can read the newspaper and drink his two cappuccinos. He never wanted to renovate anything; he wanted to travel. This neat, precise man is at home with solitary pursuits: he runs, he hikes, he does not like being disturbed. You will not find him arguing about the day’s news events or political shenanigans. He wears a pained expression when his football team wins, as if fist-pumping the air in victory would be an indecorous gesture, hurtful to the losing opposition. He is so restrained in speech and temperament that I do not honestly know if he has passions. His dress sense, like his manners, is on the formal side. He is not a Renaissance man, but he is most definitely a Victorian man.

  “This Victorian house is so you,” I say to flatter. “It resembles your character and personality perfectly. Even your build—tall, erect.”

  He looks deeply offended.

  “What?” I say. “It was a compliment!”

  He stands up abruptly and walks away.

  I shake my head and drain my mug. Where to start? I decide to go to the library and see what I can find out about Victorian terrace homes.

  9

  The Victorian Terrace: Icon of an Empire

  In the early hours of September 2, 1666, fire broke out in the bakery of Thomas Farynor on Pudding Lane in London. Who knew that his Restoration fire would spark the rise of the Victorian terrace?

  The weather had been unseasonably dry and hot that summer. Like most London homes of the time, those on Pudding Lane were of wood-and-pitch construction. It did not take long for an innocent spark, driven by parched air and wind blowing north from the Thames, to burst into a wildfire. As the flames leapfrogged from Farynor’s bake oven to a haystack to a dung heap to a thatch roof, the fire gathered force and roared a course of magnificent destruction. In four days, nearly all of London was destroyed: thirteen thousand homes consumed; more than seventy thousand people left homeless—which accounted for about 90 percent of the population. Remarkably, only six deaths were reported, though it has since been determined that because deaths of the poor and middle class were not recorded, hundreds of people actually perished in the fire.

  What happened next is a lesson in chaos theory.

  London began rebuilding immediately, without plan or prudence. While builders tried to seek out property owners and rustle up workmen, Charles II encouraged the homeless to leave the City and settle elsewhere, in effect escorting from the premises much of London’s surviving workforce.

  Meanwhile, speculators and earnest builders clamoured for the king’s attention to their grand schemes and visions for rebuilding the City. One of them was Nicholas “If Christ had not died for thee thou hadst been damned” Barbon. His unusual middle name was consistent with the trend for religious slogan names among English Puritans in the seventeenth century.

  Astute and ruthless, Barbon was a bit of a gadfly. He trained in the Netherlands as a physician, then as an economist. When the Great Fire flared up, it stoked his ambitions to get into the building trade, where he saw a profitable opportunity to trade his speculum for speculation. It should come as no surprise to learn that he pioneered the invention of fire insurance.

  Barbon, the Renaissance man with a Machiavellian heart, was quick with the shovel. While London lay open like a charred carcass, its boundaries, roads, and any semblance of order obliterated along with the housing stock, Barbon began digging west of the City, where there was open land. He progressed eastward, linking Westminster and the City in districts later known as the Strand and Bloomsbury. He must have been a supremely arrogant man, for he ignored every building restriction and legal objection and plowed his way through them. He treated the land as if it were his own. He razed buildings without permission and in their place erected residential and commercial buildings from which he reaped immense financial wealth.

  It was Barbon who came up with the idea of treating a continuous row of houses as if it were the facade of a Georgian palace, with the entrance of the central abode marked by pillars and a sprawling pediment. Thus did he become known as the father of the terrace home. Examples of his work are still around today, in London’s Grosvenor Square and in Bath’s Queen’s Square. A generation later, Thomas Cubitt took the idea and built on it.

  In 1685, Barbon published the treatise An Apology for the Builder, or A Discourse Shewing the Cause and Effects of the Increase of Building. In it he philosophizes that of the three things that man is governed by necessity to provide for himself—food, clothing, and a home—it is the need for home, for shelter, that propels man to build, and this, argues Barbon, is the foundation of all:

  It is the interest of the Government to incourage the Builders; not only because they presume and increase the subjects but they provide an imploy for them, by which they are fed, and get their livelihood.

  There are three great ways that the People in all Governments are imployed in: In providing Food, Clothes, and Houses. Now those ways are most serviceable to the Government, that imploy most of the People; Those that are imployed in feeding of them, are the fewest in number: for ten men may provide food enough for a thousand: but to cloth, and build Houses for them, requireth many hands: And there is that peculiar advantage that ought to be ascribed to the Builder, that he provideth the place of birth for all the other Arts, as well as for man. The Cloth cannot be made without houses to work it in. Now besides the vast numbers of People that are imployed in digging and making the Materials, the Bricks, Stone, Iron, Lead, &c. all those Trades that belong to the furnishing of an house, have their sole dependencies on the Builders, as the Upholsterers, Chair-makers, &c.

  Conferring the role of Grand Provider on builders was done for Barbon’s singular gain, but his treatise does make one consider the importance of builders. Without them, where would we live? Where would we work, pray, or be healed of disease and illness? How would we travel, shop, eat out, if not for facilities that shelter us from the elements and cater to our comfort? I would rank builders far ahead of chefs any day. Anyone can cook; not everyone can build.

  Today, builders are frequently chastised (sometimes justifiab
ly so) for their cowboy behaviour: their shoddy workmanship; their outrageous costs; their speculation; how they bank land and manipulate the housing crisis; how their plans rarely integrate with nature. But one of the most widespread complaints against modern builders is their penchant for cookie-cutter homes. And yet, what could possibly be more cookie cutter than the Victorian terrace?

  THE VICTORIAN TERRACE did not rise fully formed overnight; its apogee came at the latter part of the nineteenth century. Up until then, the style mavens of the day crossed swords over which was better: Gothic revival or Classical revival. The Gothicists believed that Classical architecture was rigid, that it put form ahead of function; the Classicists regarded Gothic architecture as an unholy and unsightly pastiche. The Victorians, for the most part, cast their lot with the colourful and fanciful interpretation of the Gothicists, and ransacked the architecture handbook: The foliated pillars that framed their doors were a nod to the Classical era; their fan-shaped transoms hailed from the Palladium period; timbered gables evoked the Tudor era; stone quoins referenced the Queen Anne period; the balance and proportion of their buildings were courtesy of the Regency; while the symmetry was thanks to the Georgian style. The Victorians never did anything by halves, and this being the era of upward mobility, they were not about to be shy about it, either.

  Concurrently, Britain was moving from an agrarian economy to an industrial one. Mass production was in full swing. Canals and railways allowed heavy materials to be transported economically all over the country—cast iron from Scotland, terracotta from the Midlands and the southwest, slate from Wales and Cumbria—so that house building no longer depended on available local materials. As well, advances in technology gradually brought electricity, central heating, and indoor plumbing into house design, so that it became commonplace rather than the exception.

  The Industrial Revolution triggered a demand for housing like nothing the UK had ever experienced. People flooded into towns and cities from the countryside in response to the cry for labour, and when they arrived, they needed places to live. The speculative builder answered the need with the tried-and-true template for cheap urban housing on narrow plots of land: the terrace. The housing boom of the 1850s produced millions of terraced homes.

  Of course, in class-stratified Britain there were Victorian terraces and then there were Victorian terraces, but there are common elements to the style apparent today in middle-class versions: enclosed front gardens with iron railings and gates; rear gardens delineated by low brick walls; uniform facades forming a ribbon of unbroken continuity.

  Roofs were generally steeply pitched and clad in black-slate or red-clay tiles, with hips and gables embellished with elaborate wooden barge boards and ornate ridge tiles and finials. Multi-storey bays were usually given their own steep roofs, joined to the front pitch of the main roof.

  Some styles had crenellated roofs that mimicked a castle parapet above the projecting bays; while the front courtyards, with their low stone walls squaring off the boundary line, evoked a protective moat or the enclosure system. If an Englishman’s home is his castle, the Victorian terrace fulfilled that brief across the classes.

  Under the Victorians, chimneys bloomed from being a utilitarian standard into a tall and decorated feature, with projecting courses of brickwork, stone carving, and other ornamentation. Even the lowly chimney pot got a makeover. Many were shaped like crowns, making them look like giant chess pieces or imparting a regal nod.

  Large front bay windows, often of two or three storeys of ornately decorated surrounds, became a dominant feature after 1850. Inside the home, these big bays coupled with high ceilings brought in lots of light (until the Victorians hung their enormous, heavy curtains). The sash design of the windows allowed for generous ventilation, playing to the trend toward healthy living. There was a discreet bonus to the bay windows: a more generous view of their streetscape allowed homeowners to keep tabs on the comings and goings of their neighbours.

  By the latter part of the 1800s, the Victorian terrace had grown out of the hard, ugly soil of the Industrial Revolution and flowered into a pretty architectural specimen that could be—and was—planted everywhere.

  It was not just attractive—it was handsome and heroic looking, a distinguished (if not slightly pretentious) specimen. Today, it is as beloved and cherished an icon as the cream tea, and just as pervasive. It is not a stretch to consider that Britain’s continued infatuation with the Victorian era, when the United Kingdom was at the height of its international prowess, accounts for its enduring popularity. It is a sort of psychological trigger for the country’s identity, even today. Imposing in height, trim in girth, the facade conveys power, probity, and precision. It brings Norman control and Greek beauty tidily together in one design.

  When I look up our street, lined on both sides with two-storey bayed Victorian terraces, I wonder whether more than simple residential accommodation was a factor in the design. The uniformity of the facade speaks to democracy and egalitarianism in one long, uninterrupted sweep, but it also looks militaristic. The lower bay windows are thrust out like proud chests; the upper bays are capped with a peaked helmet that stands in sharp relief from the vertiginous roof rising behind it. Solid, erect, orderly, Victorian terraces stand shoulder to shoulder like suffragettes or soldiers. Nothing says “No one fucks with us” more than a parade of double-bayed Victorian terraces.

  Internally, the layout has the flexibility to suit a multitude of ages and generations: two reception rooms plus a kitchen on the ground floor; two, three, or four bedrooms on the upper floor. As sanitation improved and bathrooms were brought indoors, the easiest place to put the bathroom was at the back of the kitchen. It is a surprise how many British homes today retain their ground-floor bathrooms. In others, the smallest bedroom has been sacrificed in order to relocate the main bathroom upstairs, allowing then for a natural extension of the kitchen. It is a floor plan that works for a professional couple, for a family of four, for retirees, for singletons. It can be dressed up or down, stretched to the loft for conversion into master bedroom suites or added storage, or into the rear yard to create large kitchen-diners.

  As I wander through these homes, it is hard to avoid the hard edge of masculinity in the design. I find myself from time to time imagining how a woman might improve on the model, how she would unpick the maleness of this house design and imbue it with more common sense and practicality.

  The most obvious design flaw of the Victorian terrace is its narrowness: the average terrace is fifteen feet wide. That makes the average front hall only thirty-three inches wide. Getting a modern sofa through that space is like pushing a twelve-pound baby through the birth canal. Surgery is almost inevitable.

  As I embraced the idea of owning a Victorian terrace, it was gratifying to learn that there are practical reasons to love it, too. A terrace has lower fuel costs than its detached counterparts. It is also less expensive to maintain: English Heritage found that repairing a standard Victorian terrace house over thirty years was 60 percent cheaper than building and maintaining a new home.

  There was a lot of architectural meat in a Victorian terrace, even in a middle-class one. Sadly, a lot of that meat has been chewed and spat out. Nowadays, you are lucky to find a home that can claim a few of its original features. Some people have ripped out their bay window and opted for a flat, double-glazed window. Or jettisoned the stained-glass transoms, the fireplaces and handsome over-mantels, the pine doors, the plaster arches, the built-in pine cabinets. Sometimes it was done in the name of modernization; sometimes it was done for money. As unemployment tore through successive postwar periods, the gentle beauty of the English Victorian home fell into decline. Anything that could be removed was traded for food or money, or chopped up and used for firewood.

  What we have since discovered about the Victorians is that for all their pretensions to morality, contentment, and middle-class family values, for all their display of affluence, they were masters of deceit and illusio
n. If Victorian society had been a city, it would have been called Hollywood.

  Adultery was rife, particularly in London, where the ratio of mostly married men to prostitutes was 25:1. No surprise, then, that syphilis became the plague of the era. The Victorian home, therefore, became a carefully staged construct of domestic bliss and God-fearing probity.

  Nowadays, probity is for prudes; but surprisingly, the Victorian terrace as a type of housing stock continues to be sought after for its charm and practicality. With some adjustments it can be the ideal home for modern living. I was banking on it being the ideal home for us.

  10

  The Preparation

  The Husband and I, not knowing where to start with this mammoth renovation, decide to tackle the wood-chip wallpaper. It covers the living room, the upper and lower halls, and the stairwell—walls and ceilings. It is a bitch to remove. When it does come off, it does so in small, flaky segments. Occasionally, we hit gold, where the adhesive’s grip has worn away over time and allows for the wallpaper to be satisfyingly pulled away in long sheets. We end up in unspoken competition to see which one of us can find those patches of keyless wallpaper.

  Removing wallpaper is tedious work, but it does ripen conditions for daydreaming and reminiscing. I am the type of person who actually looks forward to mundane domestic tasks for that very reason, that performing them will let my mind wander to the places it needs to go at that particular time. Now, scraping the surface, shimmying the blade of my scraper under the edge of the paper, prying it off the wall, I begin to feel like I am scraping the surface of my life. Each scrape removes another level and another, sliding deeper into the past until a pocket of air is reached that allows memory to gush in. Before I know it, I am back in Don Mills, answering the door of our Larkfield Drive house to greet my best friend, Cheryll. Do children still call on one another to come out and play? Or is it done by text, or scheduled in advance as managed playdates by nervous parents? I feel fortunate to have lived in a time when children could come and go from home and no one would worry.