The Guru Josh Development Project 2008

Hello, and welcome to another edition of Property Ladder with me, Sarah Beeny.

This week we follow first-time developer Ditzy McGee as she attempts to renovate an end of terrace townhouse in Archway.



With no budget, no property developing expertise and no trousers, Ditzy was never going to find this an easy task. But instead of drawing up a schedule and calling in the builders, Ditzy has decided to take a handful of benzodiazepines and get on with the job herself.

You have to admire her pluck. This house is in a pretty poor state. It needs new windows and a new roof, and the garden is an overgrown mess. In my opinion it's going to need twenty thousand pounds just to make it habitable, but Ditzy has made the classic error of thinking she can save money by doing all the work herself. In four-inch heels. With no trousers on.

Three days later, I'm back on site to see how Ditzy is getting on. And oh dear - she's made the classic error of focusing on the styling, rather than getting the basic structural work done. The neutral Ikea Klippan sofa and shabby-chic pallet should appeal to the young professional market, but the television isn't nearly contemporary enough, and the saxophone is a bizarre touch that could alienate family buyers.

What's really worrying me, though, is that Ditzy hasn't put any windows in. Windows are a crucial feature of any property. Put windows in, and you're on the right path to making a profit. But leave them as gaping holes and you're limiting your market to squatters, cavemen and bats - none of whom can afford North London's sky-high property prices.

I think it's time I had a word.

I try to tell Ditzy where she's going wrong, but I'm not sure she's listening. She's too busy watching The Hitman and Her and mooning about in her bra. Sometimes I wonder if she's really committed to this project at all.

It's now four weeks into the development, and Ditzy has at last realised that she needs to get some serious building work done. Against all my advice, though, she's decided that what the house needs is another window, right next to one of the existing windows. Ditzy is making the classic mistake of doing the first thing that comes into her head while hopped up on psychotropics, and failing to concentrate on what her target market really needs.

Before you make any major alterations, you should always put on protective clothing and seek the advice of a structural engineer. I'm afraid to say that Ditzy has done neither. Taking a sledgehammer to a load-bearing wall while in the grip of a mind-altering substance is not something I would ever advise, but from the start, Ditzy has been determined to do this development her own way. I admire her single-mindedness, but I'm not sure it's going to pay off.

Sadly we will never find out, as three weeks after my last visit, Ditzy smashed up the television and ran away with the fairies. Property developing may look easy, but in reality it's anything but. If you're the kind of person who finds wearing trousers a difficult feat, property development is probably not the career for you.

Next week: Kevin McCloud watches the Pussycat Dolls build an underground eco-house in the Mendip hills.

Mannequin Pis

Given that Elle Decoration comes out with a 'small spaces' supplement on average about three times a year, I often wonder how they keep coming up with ideas to fill it.

I mean, there are only so many ways you can fit a desk under the stairs, or drawers *into* the stairs, or a mezzanine bedroom into the achingly fashionable live-work space that you created from a disused shipping container.

But this time, the Elle Deco team have surpassed themselves. They've located a tiny Belgian house in which the toilet is next to the bed, and the bed is next to an uncurtained plate-glass, shop-style window:


I know our Continental friends are more relaxed than us uptight Brits, but even so. Would you *really* want this kind of arrangement in your home? (Think carefully, now.)

And more to the point, would you really want to be one of these people's neighbours?

Brrr.

Hidden Art

Some photos from the Hidden Art Cornwall Design Fair, what the lovely Mr BC and I visited this morning.


It's an exhibition of contemporary Cornish designers and furniture-makers, held in the fantastically falling-apart 15th-century Godolphin House near Helston.


The house has been taken over recently by the National Trust, but is still so decrepit that they can only let 80 people in at once in case the floors collapse.


Neither my camera nor my photography 'skillz' could really do justice to the fantastic juxtaposition of modern design and crumbling late-medieval plaster.


Outside there were tents where you could buy the designers' wares. We bought some coasters from our near-neighbour, Lucy Turner of Higher Market Studios here in Penryn, who rescues unloved 50s and 60s furniture from the local charity furniture shop and turns it into very nice, one-off pieces like this:



It's on again tomorrow (Bank Holiday Monday) from 11am to 6pm, so if anyone reading is in the vicinity of Helston, I'd highly recommend a visit. It's £6 to get in but well worth it.

You can see more photos on my Facebook page here.

Dining Chair Nirvana

Attention, shoppers! Why buy one 'Verdi' dining chair from Habitat for £99.00 minus delivery...



...when you can get FOUR white maple dining chairs from M&S for £74.70 including delivery?



(What's more, with the M&S deal, you and up to three of your chums can play a splendid game of Musical Christine Keeler! Hours of saucy fun!)

Paging Mervyn King

You were probably thinking that this country's incipient economic slowdown has been caused by things like the US sub-prime mortgage bubble bursting, the rising price of oil, the rising price of food, the rising price of water*, the abolition of the 10p tax rate and the sudden reluctance of banking institutions to lend anyone - even each other - any money at all.

Well, more fool you, because according to Elle Decoration editor Michelle Ogundehin, all this is a nonsensical fabrication made up by 'statisticians'.

'I hear people aren't shopping as much,' laments Ogundehin in this month's editorial**, as word of our new-found parsimoniousness wafts on a gentle zephyr into her luxury modernist retreat in one of Cloud Cuckoo Land's better postcodes.

But Michelle isn't buying all that depressing economics guff. What's really causing British consumers to tighten their purse strings, she believes, is their inability to find really good, authentic designer furniture.

Never mind the price of a pint of milk, the fact that the market is now flooded - simply flooded, darling! - with fake copies of Mies van der Rohe's 'Barcelona' chair is causing British shoppers great distress, to the extent that we literally don't want to go shopping until the nasty fakers stop 'devaluing the meaning of good design'.


Alistair Darling, know thine enemy.

But don't worry, people of Britain! Michelle has a cunning plan to restart the flagging economy and get us all shopping again. All we need to do is go to the 10 Downing Street website and sign a petition demanding that fake designer furniture be outlawed.

'After all, without authenticity there can be no quality, no meaning and ultimately no value,' she warns. And no megabucks for her furniture-designer friends either, presumably.

(While you're there, you may like to sign something that's ACTUALLY WORTHWHILE. Like this one, perhaps.)


* My monthly water bill went up from £112 to £134 last month. How can this even be possible?

** I wanted to link to this, but sadly Elle Deco has no online presence. UPDATE: But wait! I can copy it out...so here we go, the economic wisdom of the Oracle of Kings Reach Tower IN FULL:

'Authenticity is the word ringing in my ears this month. I hear people aren't shopping as much and statisticians have put it down to the fragile state of the economy. I don't think it's just that. I think there's simply not enough good stuff out there. Consumers, you and me, aren't stupid. We don't buy things we don't like, that we think are overpriced or badly made, whether that's homes, furniture or dresses.

But, of more concern, on the design front, cheap is coming increasingly in the form of knock-off versions of classic pieces. These fakes are invariably produced using lesser quality materials, often in sub-standard factory conditions and with little consideration for human rights***. As such they devalue the meaning of good design at every level.

And yet it was recently brought to my attention that it's legal in the UK to manufacture and/or supply such copies just 30 years after the issue of the original design, as opposed to a minimum of 70 years after the death of the designer, as it is in Germany or Switzerland.

Fakes flood the UK market because we don't have sufficient laws to prevent them. We effectively promote plagiarism! What can you do? Simple. Join the campaign to have the law changed by adding your name to the e-petition lodged on the official 10 Downing Street website.

ELLE Decoration has an absolute editorial policy of never knowingly endorsing copies of iconic designs. After all, without authenticity there can be no quality, no meaning and ultimately no value, whatever price you paid. Add your name at http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/CapperCopyright.'

*** You will note that protecting the human rights of people working in these supposed designer knock-off sweatshops does not turn out to be La Ogundehin's primary concern...

I've Never Been Convinced About That Pink Wall, Though

I was starting to make scones earlier when I was struck by the aesthetically pleasing arrangement of the stuff I was putting on the table, so I took a photo:


NB The orchid was a present from the lovely Tabby Rabbit, rather than a scone ingredient.

Bonus Picture: A cat, nominally mine, demonstrating that the sun really does shine out of her arse:


UPDATE: In other (completely unrelated) news, it's looking like my hunch about the Guardian letters pages was correct...

I'll Pack Next Weekend, Honest

For someone who's meant to be packing up her flat ready for the Big Move, I'm having a lovely time merrily filling it with more stuff.

Here are some things that have found their way into the flat over the past few days:

1. A 1940s wardrobe that I bought ten years ago, and which has been in the possession of my brother and the lovely L for the past five years or so. Inside it's divided into wood and glass compartments with neat enamel labels reading 'Shirts', 'Hats', 'Ties', 'Pyjamas', and so on. 'There's one section that leads to Narnia,' said my brother, matter of factly, 'but I got bored of that one. I prefer the 'Hats' section now.'

2. Two office chairs, one orthopaedic, one not.

3. A large, old, seaman's chest (the wood and metal sort, not a torso, that would be horrible), of the sort that, if my life were a Susan Cooper novel, would probably yield up an ancient brass telescope case with a rolled up map inside with obscure instructions written in Old English, pointing to the location of the resting place of the Holy Grail. (I've checked though, and it only has air fresheners in it.)

4. Two more Pantone mugs. I already had the orange one, and now I have the lime green and the red one* as well. These are the greatest mugs ever, and I will not stop until I have them ALL.


5. A black silk 50s-style dress with a big bow on it, for the awards bash on Thursday. In my mind I look like Audrey Hepburn in it. Then I remember that Audrey Hepburn wasn't five feet tall with a scruffy blonde mop, and that I probably look more like a dwarf version of Jilly Goolden.

6. A second-hand copy of The Fields Beneath, by Gillian Tindall, which I had a copy of before and then lost**. It's the most engaging and beautifully written bit of social history you're ever likely to read. It's a very female take on history: eschewing dates and battles and timelines for a more organic view of how London's ancient past can still be sensed and detected and felt in the present.

(In fact if Tim is still on his mission to read more stuff by female writers, then I highly recommend this, and I'm sure Chuffy! will back me up.)

Here's an extract:

In this sense, the past can be said to be still there, not just existing in the minds of those who seek it, but actually, physically, still present. The town is a palimpsest: the statement it makes in each era is engraved over the only partially-effaced traces of previous statements.

Freud used the image of the ancient city as a metaphor for the Unconscious: he envisaged a city 'in which nothing that has once come into existence will have passed away and all of the earlier phases of development continue to exist alongside the latest ones.' He was talking about the Unconscious of one individual, but perhaps the city is a more obvious metaphor for Jung's Collective Unconscious of the race: we may know nothing about our nineteenth- or seventeenth- or fourteenth-century predecessors on the patch of territory we call ours, but their ideas and actions have shaped our habitat and hence our attitudes as well.

In Blake's poetic vision 'everything exists' for ever: experience is total and cumulative, nothing, not one hair, one particle of dust, can pass away. And in point of fact he was right. Matter is hard to destroy totally, even though it may be transformed by time and violence out of all recognition. In the pulverised rubble lying below modern buildings is the sediment of mediaeval and pre-mediaeval brick and stone [...] Many of our London gardens owe their rich topsoil to manure from long forgotten horses and cattle, and vegetable refuse from meals unimaginably remote in time. [...]

Seeing the past is not a matter of waving a magic wand. It is much more a matter of wielding a spade or pick, of tracing routes - and hence roots - on old maps, of reading the browned ink and even fainter pencil scrawl of preserved documents, whose own edges are often crumbling away into a powder, themselves joining the fur, flesh and faeces to which they testify.

I think it's probably because of this book, which is a social history of Kentish Town in London, that the four years I spent living there seem somehow more meaningful than any time I've ever spent elsewhere.

7. A green shield bug, which has been put out of the window twice, but somehow keeps finding its way back in. Which is amazingly tenacious, seeing as I live three floors up.

In other news, today Mr BC and I met Billy and Llewtrah in the street. Imagine that, eh, just running randomly into other bloggers in the real world! It was as though the very fabric of space and time had been rent, and creatures from the Otherworld had crossed into this one.

It was raining, though, so we didn't chat for long.


* I have been gently reminded that the red one is not in fact mine, and that I must curb my mug-lust lest in my delirious state I also falsely claim ownership of this one.

** It would have been very fitting if the one I bought yesterday in the Oxfam bookshop in Turnham Green Terrace had turned out to be my original, lost copy, but sadly this was not the case.

Mmm, Colours

I may wear drab colours all the time ('they're earth tones, and she looks very nice,' said Mr BC gallantly, but my Granny didn't hear him), but that doesn't mean I don't like really bright colours.

If I had a car, for example, I would like a sky-blue Capri with pillar-box red leather seats.

Sky blue and pillar-box red is a very pleasing colour combination, and one that's employed to marvellous effect by the owner of this house:


That house is in a street near my flat, in a row of houses that are all painted different colours, creating an effect that at times is quite stunningly beautiful. I might take pictures of them all, over a period of time, and see if Elle Decoration wants to cover-mount them as a set of Top Trumps.

Here's another one so you can see the sort of thing, although these people were clearly a bit more conservative in choosing their door/wall paint colour combo:


Anyway, enough of that, the sun is shining, I'm wearing a drab-coloured dress, taupe-coloured trainers and a drab-coloured jacket, and I've got a train to catch to Truro...

Greatest Décor Idea Ever

The search terms I get seem to be ten times duller than everyone else's*, so I don't usually publish them. But I just noticed that someone got here by searching for space invaders flock wallpaper.

Now I really, *really* want some. Sadly it doesn't seem to exist. Anyone know?


* But just as a quick round-up: no, I'm afraid I don't know where Danny Dyer lives, I don't know how to rob objects from other people's rooms in Habbo Hotel, and I don't know if Elliott Smith ever wore pink. But I am pretty sure that insects can't get into your brain through your ear, although I have a terrible irrational fear that a spider (which is not an insect) can**, and not only will it get in, but it will also MAKE A WEB THERE.

** And therefore so can Spider-Man (not Spiderman, sorry).

Punk

INT. QUINQUIREME TOWERS - DAY

ME: Ooh look, Tim Footman called me 'the Poly Styrene of the blogosphere'. I'm so punk rock.

MR BC: You *are* punk rock.

There is a pause, during which I sip Earl Grey tea and look at the Habitat catalogue.

MR BC: Of course, she went mad, you know.

ME: Yes, well, I went mad too, but then I took drugs and got better.

Eaten Trifles

After a 25-year hiatus, I have now eaten trifle twice in the same week. I am wondering if this is a sign. Are we in for some kind of 70s party food revival? Will there be cheese footballs and sausages on sticks? Will it lead to joyless wife-swapping, Nana Mouskouri and oversized spectacles?

I have some pictorial evidence (not of joyless wife-swapping), but New Blogger isn't letting me upload photos just at present.

In foreign media news: I started giggling twice in the paper shop this morning; once at the title of a magazine I hadn't seen before, called Psycho Enfants, and once at French Elle Decoration's giddy declaration: 'On craque pour le style girly!'*

(Must buy floral teacups immediately.)

In music news: Chicago's finest unsigned twee electro-country band, Track a Tiger, have a new album. Possibly the only US indie band to link to Cricketing Dave from their website, Track a Tiger are generously giving away two tracks from the new opus, viz:


Track a Tiger - Saint About To Fall (mp3)

Track a Tiger - All These Accidents (mp3)


As ever, it isn't going to change your life, but it'll sound nice while you're potting geraniums, having a bath or sipping Lapsang Souchong from a floral teacup. Which, after all, are what Sundays are all about.


* The lovely Mr BC promptly translated 'on craque' as 'on crack', which made me laugh a lot.

My Middle Class Orgasms

(Anyone who is related to me, or who works with me, may care to look away for the duration of this post, as I fearlessly throw my editorial policy to the wind...)

It's been a long time since I stopped reading Cosmopolitan, and you don't get too many articles about the female orgasm in Wired or the Economist, so I don't know if this is common or not. But essentially, all you need to know (although you may feel that you didn't need to know this at all) is that at times of - ahem - intense sexual pleasure, I hallucinate.

These aren't your run-of-the-mill swirly psychedelic visuals, of the sort produced by illicit hallucinogens. Oh no. They're much more refined than that. More refined, and more materialistic. And quite design-led. So refined, materialistic and design-led, in fact, that sometimes it's a bit like watching a film of A Rebours directed by the art editor of Elle Decoration.

Here, by way of example, are some of my frequently-recurring coital visions:

• A lovely Elizabethan knot garden



• A lovely Elizabethan knot garden under the snow



• An entire collection of retro Marimekko-style furnishing fabric



• A flotilla of steampunk airships in the style of Fornasetti



• A set of cushions with bold art naif flower prints



• Some nice candy-coloured notebooks with a treeline silhouette motif

I'm not sure what conclusion to draw from this, other than that my brain has somehow accidentally got wired up to Condé Nast. I don't know whether I'm inadvertently producing issues of House and Garden, or they're streaming back copies of World of Interiors straight into my head, but either way it's an arrangement that works for me. You can never see enough nice stationery, in my opinion.

Next week: My Middle Class Dreams, starring Florence Broadhurst and Nigel Slater.

Blog Of The Week!

Oohhh, it's non-stop lovely lovely online design porn:

Bend To Squares

Oohhhhh.

Must look again.

Ooohhhh.

PS Don't Do It, Kids

Still, it's always nice to have friends to fall back on...



(Artistic licence courtesy of LC)



This evening's question is: do I have time to go to the Oxo Tower tomorrow, avail myself of two very fetching Mibo lampshades, and still make it to Parliament Square in time for the kick-off of the British Troops Out Of Iraq march? And more to the point, will the lampshades be a help or a hindrance to the entire proceedings? Am I going to find myself shouting "What do we want? More lampshades like this! I mean, an end to our totally unjustified military occupation of a foreign country!"

This has been me, Patroclus, bringing you the latest news from the frontline of grassroots political activism. And interior décor.

Mind you, I once turned up to an anti-Criminal Justice Bill rally wearing a suit. There was a certain irony to the fact that the crusty leading the goats up the steps of the QEII Conference Centre looked at *me* funny.