From Blandings to Brideshead

I became aware of the role played by architecture in literature reading Colette’s 1933 novella, La Chatte.

Alain and Camille, newly married, go to live in a borrowed flat in Paris on the 9th floor of a modernist, concrete block with glass walls and angular balconies and rooms called the Wedge. Is this the first instance of a modern building being called after its shape? Lord Dunmore’s 18th century Pineapple may actually be the first. The Wedge contrasts starkly with Alain’s bucolic childhood home at Neuilly. The marriage is as uncomfortable as the apartment and it is a ménage a trois as Alain’s treasured Chartreux cat, Saha, lives with them. Not hard to guess which female comes out on top.

Trollope uses buildings to evoke their owners as does Homan Potterton in Knockfane. Then, like Knockfane, so many authors use the names of houses as titles: Trollope, Jane Austen, PG Wodehouse, Evelyn Waugh, Dornford Yates,  Alaa  al Aswany (The Yacoubian Building) – the list is endless.

I’m no feng shui fan but I believe the spaces we live in can be changed to immeasurably improve our lives. Rows of late Victorian, red brick terraces in west London do not set my heart racing. But interiors can be adapted to thrill while retaining a lot of original architectural integrity, and that’s where a sprinkling of Alan Higgs’s fairy dust comes in. Our kitchen, study, garden and one bathroom have had the AHA treatment.  Coincidentally Alan designed a puppy-friendly kitchen.