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- [00:03]
A
There's always an interesting dialogue between what someone's home looks like and who they actually are. So, you know, a common charge might be, well, this place looks very serene, you must be very calm. No, it's precisely because you're not calm that you need that serenity hugely. The reason why people develop OCD is always the same. It's that they've experienced graduation, great lack of safety and a lack of love. Love is the great insulator, literally creates a bubble, a home around somebody. If you can case a person in love, they don't need so much casing of architecture.
- [00:42]
B
Hello and welcome to Homing. I'm Matt Gibbard. Does a home have the power to make us happy? Why do some people feel safe if surrounded by objects, while others can only settle in pared down spaces? And what compels us to keep rearranging the rooms around us as if we're trying to rearrange something inside ourselves? Here to explore these existential questions with me is the writer and philosopher Alain de Botton. For many years Alain has explored the emotional forces that shape our inner lives, from love and loss to to status anxiety. Through his educational organization, the School of Life, he's focused on well being and self understanding. And much of this thinking connects back to buildings. In his book the Architecture of Happiness, Alan argues that the built environment is never neutral. It can steady us, unsettle us, and quietly influence who we become. Fittingly, we recorded this conversation in Alan's house in North London. He reflects on his own relationship with domestic space, how in many ways he spent a lifetime trying to recreate the modernist calm of his childhood home in Switzerland. We talk about beauty, belonging and control and about why so many of us turn to architecture in search of a kind of psychological skin. This is a conversation that goes to the heart of what homing is all about. How we build safety both in the spaces around us and within ourselves. I hope you enjoy listening. Hi Alain.
- [02:24]
A
Hello Matt.
- [02:25]
B
Thank you so much for joining us on Homing. It's really good to be in your actual home. Lends it something, I think. So the first question for you is what does the word home mean to you?
- [02:38]
A
It's a good word. There's a lovely collection of essays by the English psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, who wrote this book called Home is where We Start from and it's where we start from, but also where we're headed to. It's not just the beginning because we tend to change homes over our lives. Anyone who lived in the same home all their life, you'd feel sorry for them. There's something about a necessary transition. But I suppose that the dream behind the word home is that it's a container for everything that matters to you. It's. It's a security against dispersal and threat, understood both abstractly and concretely.
- [03:20]
B
Why do you say that we'd feel sorry for someone that lived in the same place their whole life? I'm interested in that, because isn't that in some senses, the dream?
- [03:30]
A
I mean, I think, you know, imagine if you had the same bedroom all the time. You know, your child's bedroom became the bedroom where you spent your wedding night and where, you know, your children came to see you. Bedtime. You know, we need a child because we're changing. It's like wearing the same clothes. I think the ideals that animate home can remain the same. Safety, containment. But as we change. So the home needs to change. Because I think the ideal of home is that it anchors you to values that you think are important, but they're a bit under threat in daily life. So there's that feeling of coming home after a long trip away or something. And the home helps to remind you of sort of who you are, what you care about, what's important to you. Why is it a problem living in a hotel, for example? If money were no object, if practicality was no object, why wouldn't you live in a hotel? Hotels can be lovely places, but by definition, they're places in which a wide variety of people inhabit. So there's nothing personal. And there is that way in which once you put somebody in a space, and it could be the barest sort of space, you try to personalize that space. You put some object that is reminiscent of something that you care about, and that's the beginning of home. If you were in a hotel and you rearrange the vase or you put something over a picture or something, that would be the beginning of homemaking. Homemaking is essentially a process of translating what's in you into the language of objects, placings, colors, et cetera. And we're really looking for an analogy between somebody in their home. The home is a translation of, you know, it's a kind of work of autobiography, as it were. It's a translation of what matters to them in the language of furnishings.
- [05:18]
B
Yeah, it's interesting that I met someone recently, and she said that when she was a child, she'd take the posters off her bedroom wall, and when they went on holiday to, you know, somewhere in Spain, she'd pin them up again on the. On the wall of her bedroom at the hotel. What's she doing there, do you think? Why is she doing that?
- [05:37]
A
I mean, I think that's the really important question is why is she doing that? Why do most people not do that? Because to me, it suggests a susceptibility to space. There are some people, blessed people, who don't care about the spaces. And I think I associate that with a kind of inner robustness. They don't care what the outer world is like because their inner world is very settled. Their inner world is very contained. Whereas the sort of people, and I put myself among them who can't sleep because the chair's in the wrong place or there's a mark on the wall or something, you're really hostage to fortune because the world generally can't accommodate your wishes. So that hypersensitivity to space, I think, is, you know, you're lacking a skin, psychological skin, and you're asking the outer world to provide that for you. And that is a risky thing to do and an expensive thing to do, time consuming, because, you know, you're all the time going to have to take your posters with you. So I think scratch the surface of anyone who does that, and I think that they're probably lacking a kind of psychological home, and they need to create an architectural home to protect them from the lack of a psychological home. The more robust your psychological home, the more it doesn't matter what the environment is like.
- [07:05]
B
Yeah, I couldn't agree more with that. That would be my observation of everyone I've spoken to as well on this podcast.
- [07:12]
A
Actually, you pick it up in the area of wealth. So we know, for example, that somebody who's making their whole home out of gold and marble and very expensive materials, that they're compensating for something that seems to be lacking inside them. So the outer world is being asked to do something that their inner state is very sort of vulnerable to. In other words, a feeling of the opposite. And so I think there's always an interesting dialogue between what someone's home looks like and who they actually are. So a common charge might be, well, this place looks very serene. You must be very calm. No, it's precisely because you're not calm that you need that serenity hugely. If somebody needs a very creative, chaotic environment, it's probably because the danger that they're responding to and they're decorating against is the danger of stillness and a kind of inner deadness. One of the huge questions in this area is why do people have different tastes? And I think they have different tastes because they have different psychological needs. And the psychological need is almost diametrically opposed to. To the way in which it's then translated into objects. So the person who, as I say, who is agitated, will be building a calm space and on and on.
- [08:31]
B
Yeah. So interesting. So someone that I asked that question to recently, what does the word home mean? He said, for me, the home is my body. My body is an extension of the home somehow. What do you think he is saying with that?
- [08:50]
A
Well, I think he's saying that his body is, in a way, not doing what bodies normally do and should do. Why is the house being invited to continue to be his body? And I think it's because something's gone a bit wrong in his relationship. I mean, I say this because I identify with this. I'm exactly the same. My house is also an extension. So the house has become a tool for something that the psyche isn't able to. To continue to do. And it means that literally you're more easily in pain because somebody could scratch your wall and it would be like scratching your leg, and that's painful. So we really have to feel sorry for people who spend their weekends looking at furniture shops or look at the modern house website for entertainment, etc. These are people who need help, they need psychotherapy, they need love, they need containment. They're not getting it from other places. And look, the only reason I can say this is I'm that person.
- [09:50]
B
Yeah, I think I might be as well.
- [09:52]
A
But don't tell anyone, and probably anyone watching, this is also that person. So we love you, we feel sorry for you, but there is a wound here that we need to be honest about. No one else goes to see furniture shops other than the wounded. For some people, a chair is a chair. And for the more vulnerable among us, a chair is an extension of our psyches, which is why I spent 35 hours trying to choose this chair.
- [10:17]
B
Why this one, then?
- [10:20]
A
Because it's trying to speak. I mean, objects speak, don't they? They speak about certain things. One kind of designer fork will say one thing. You could look at two chairs. One chair is saying, it's 1832 and I would like the old regime to be back. Another chair will be saying, It's 1955 and I'm looking forward to the future. Another chair will be going, I would like everyone in my society to be happy, more or less equal, and vote in free and fair elections. I think this chair's sort of saying that And I like that message. It's a nice message.
- [10:54]
B
Yeah, interesting. Just sticking with this first section of defining the word home. Why do so many of us have dreams about the home, do you think? Especially our childhood home. I mean, I do. I go back there quite regularly to the hallway and I run my hands along the walls and I'm sometimes in the bedroom. What's happening there, do you think?
- [11:15]
A
I mean, that initial childhood home is so significant. I remember when I was decorating the home into which my children would be born, I thought, for me, it's just one home among others. It's one door handle among others. It's one chair among others. For them, that would be the first chair, that carpet, you know, the childhood carpet, the carpet on which you lie, or the floor on which you lie and you look at the ceiling and you might cry on it in a curled up ball or whatever it is that was, as you say, it will stay with you forever. I think it's in that first home that we learn about space, we learn about touch. If you think of children drive their parents mad, little children, because they're essentially doing architectural exploration all the time. They're running their fingers along walls, they're trying to work out gravity, they're working out the textures of things, they're working out how light affects colors, et cetera. All of that is unfolding. So a huge amount of data really is going in. So for anyone who's sensitive to space, that sensitivity will have been first developed in childhood. I mean, there are then other. Many of us leave home too early. Many of us are in homes where there's fighting, there's unhappiness, et cetera. So there's lots of other reasons why these homes might mark us. If you're an unhappy child, sometimes the home is quite nice, but the family's unhappy, or your room is quite nice, or you turn to objects to give you a comfort that's not necessarily existing in the people. So you might make particular friends with a corner of the sofa because that's where you go and things are not well. So again, we can see a kind of compensatory effort.
- [13:02]
B
Yeah, yeah. You did a documentary years ago where you revisited your own childhood home in Switzerland. Right. Just from your perspective, what did that place teach you about space and materials and things? Because it seems to me you've carried on that very modern way of living through your life, right?
- [13:23]
A
Yep. So I grew up in the 1970s in Zurich and my parents bought an apartment in a. What would have been a recently Completed very identifiably modernist block of flats. It was done in concrete. Large windows, kind of austere, but really, you know, the Swiss do these finishes so well. It felt. It felt like a tank. I mean, it felt so solid. It had an air raid shelter in it, nuclear shelter, which at the time, all Swiss houses were mandated to have, but the whole house was kind of like a nuclear shelter. And I gained enormous comfort from it as a child. I loved that house. I loved the concrete. I remember running my fingers along concrete walls. I liked the fact that the carpet was laid onto a concrete floor, so there was absolutely no give in the floors at all. And the windows shut in a way, which, I mean, in Britain, we're still not really familiar with those windows, but in continental Europe, especially in Germany and Switzerland, they're very standard windows, and they've been around probably for about 50 years, if not more, but large panes of glass, very insulated with a big aluminium handle which shut with a very satisfying noise. So it felt, you know, it felt generous and safe and, you know, clean and optimistic about the world. You know, if that building was speaking, it was saying, you know, we can build in new materials and not be afraid of modernity. And, yeah, the future is bright. And I remember that I then went to boarding school in England when I was 8, and that's a very young age for a boy. And my dislocation from my childhood home sort of translated itself or manifested itself in my feelings towards the architecture that I encountered in North Oxford, where I was going to school and ended up in a very drafty Victorian house, which I think hatred is not too strong a word. I loathed that building. I loathed what it spoke of. It seemed pretentious, frightening, but also very badly built. It rattled, the windows rattled. There were drafts all the time, the materials. There was linoleum floors. There was sort of almost industrial paints in the bedroom walls. It was hideous. And I felt an ache and nostalgia for the door handles, the windows, the carpets, the furnishings of home and of Swiss modernism. And a large part of my adult life has been spent essentially trying to rebuild the house that I left far too early. My parents then moved to England when I was 11, and that childhood home went. And I've literally and not mysteriously. We don't need a psychoanalyst in the room. I've just been trying to recreate it. And so I've lived in a succession of modernist houses in the UK and have real enthusiasm for contemporary architecture that takes place at many levels. It's about form, but it's also about how modern spaces sound. A modern room sounds very different from a 19th century room. To do the windows, to do with the floors. And all of this matters hugely to me. But I mean, it's at the level of a kind of obsession because it really defies. Most people would go, is this the house? Just get any old house, what does it matter? There's a certain kind of door handle which I'm very keen on, and that's the door handle that was in the house of my childhood. So I've gone to seek out that door handle, which is manufactured by fsb. It was designed by Max Bill, a Swiss architect, in the 50s originally for the Swiss railways. And they then made it as a door handle for domestic environments. That was a door handle I grew up with and found that they still made it. And so now that handle is everywhere where I try and I put one in my study where I work. And yeah, it's. It's home when I put my hand on it.
- [17:44]
B
That's so interesting, isn't it? I love that Juhani Palasma quote, which is that, you know, the door handle is the handshake of the building.
- [17:51]
A
Oh, wow.
- [17:52]
B
Which is such great.
- [17:52]
A
Know that. Yeah.
- [17:53]
B
Isn't that great?
- [17:54]
A
Door handle is the handshake of the building.
- [17:55]
B
Yeah.
- [17:56]
A
So interesting. I sometimes think of it as like the shoes of a person because, you know, when you look at somebody's shoes, you gain an awful lot of insight into their aesthetic. Sometimes you can't really work out, like, what they like, but you look at the shoe and you, ah, okay. That's the core of them. So it's a particularly telling detail.
- [18:10]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [18:11]
A
You can sense the spirit of a place by checking out the torhant. But yeah, it's lovely quote.
- [18:15]
B
It's a good one. Before we started recording, we were talking about, let's say, a Netflix series where the serial killer always lives in a modernist house. And it's very clinical, very clean. Why is that association made and why do you not see it in that way?
- [18:35]
A
I do see it in that way. I'm not a serial killer. And there are many, many more people who like modernism than are serial killers. I mean, just the Venn diagram is relatively small, the interlocking bit. But undoubtedly, you know, again, I want to say we should feel sorry for modernists like me because they're so. They are maniacal. They'll get unhappy that, you know, to planes are not aligned properly. And that's a hideous kind of vulnerability to Take out into the world because the world can't generally meet your needs. And if you're that intolerant of surfaces and materials, you might carry that intolerance into relationships. You might become a horrible person. You might need to break up with someone because they, I don't know, don't put the chair in the correct place. So you might be a horrible person. I mean, I think that anyone who's watching, who feels that susceptibility, who's on an early dinner date or just getting to know someone, should make a candid admission that they're not fully well and that their unwellness has translated itself into a kind of mania for architecture and design. And what they really are looking for is comfort and understanding and sympathy. They're not bad people. They're not unlikely to be serial killers. They just need a hug and they need to. They haven't felt at home in the world, and that's why they feel a very strong need to literally make a home that's a bit more policed, if you like, than most other. Most other people are able to allow foreignness into their home. It doesn't matter if there's a bit of stray influences and others among us will get unhappy that someone gave us. Someone might give us a mug with a particular kind of design. And most people go, oh, that's great. Thanks for the mug. And I'd go, thank you so much for the mug. I'd then need to pied it because it would conflict with the other mugs.
- [20:27]
B
Good to know.
- [20:29]
A
And that's. I mean, you're on the way to being a horrible person then, or at least a difficult person.
- [20:34]
B
So, yeah, so we're trying to get the built environment to help us cope somehow. Do you think then the home has the power to actually make us happy?
- [20:45]
A
I really do now. Gotta be careful here. There are divorces in beautiful homes. There are terrible things in beautiful homes. So I would say that architecture is an invitation to a certain state of mind, but it's not a foolproof guarantee that that state of mind will occur. And that's why sometimes you get these horrific mismatches, almost comedic mismatches, sometimes when the scenario unfolding is so at odds with the inner state. And you get this when people go on fancy holidays. Let's say it's beautiful weather outside, you're in a lovely place, and yet you're squabbling with your partner or your children or your parents or whatever it is, and you can feel you're not living up to the environment. The environment is saying, be happy, be calm, be sweet. And you're overwhelmed by feelings that are running in another direction. And that same thing can happen with architecture. That said, look, I think of it like the weather. Many of us feel in summer or on sunny days that the best sides of us are being encouraged. Not guaranteed, but encouraged. Someone is whispering to us, look on the bright side. There are always many sides to a life. A sunny day is inviting those more positive aspects. And I think a beautiful home is again doing that. It's saying, you know, I know you may be sad, I know you may have a lot of regrets. I know you may have made lots of bad choices, but let's try and look on, you know, the sunny side.
- [22:11]
B
Yeah, you've argued that beauty encourages us to be better people in some way in your books and so on. How does that play out in the home, would you say?
- [22:22]
A
Well, you know, it's a slightly tricky thing. I mean, dictators have always known this, that architecture carries moral values. There is democratic architecture and there is fascist architecture, to use a more basic thing. I mean, if you look at some fascinating works being done on architecture in Germany in the interwar years, Nazi years, post war years, architecture in the old East Germany, West Germany, et cetera, and you can really drill into this. There's such a thing as a fascist window, and there's such a thing as a democratic window. Literally, it's got to do with all kinds of things. And therefore a home is also an eloquent piece of machinery that is speaking values. It's suggesting one's value system. And that can be a wonderful thing if you're in the business of trying to be eloquent about your value system through the language of form.
- [23:19]
B
Well, that brings us on to identity then, I think, let's say climbing the property ladder as an example. What are we doing when we're doing that? There's obvious financial repercussions to it. But why are we doing it from an identity standpoint, do you think?
- [23:36]
A
Well, I mean, we see this with clothes. Why are we interested in choosing our own clothes? When we were little, someone else chose our clothes for us. When you were five, your mom or dad chooses your clothes. When you're 15, you want to choose your own clothes. It becomes very, very important. If you said to somebody, you just got to wear these clothes and you can't change. Most of us would feel that one of our sort of basic freedoms was being infringed. The concept of having to wear a uniform is an unhappy one. It's so fascinating but also poignant that in so many areas of life we can choose, we can choose our clothes, we can choose the food we eat on a good day, we can choose the job we do. Or at least to some extent we can, we can choose the friends we have, choose the partners we have. In a country like the UK at this point in history, it's extremely hard to find a space that you can put your own stamp onto. The costs of doing so are astronomical. And also the choice in the, you know, the estate agents market is so limited. If it were translated into the world of restaurants, it would be goulash every day and that's it. You can't have anything else or Turkey Twizzlets or worse. And it's such an inhibiting factor. And so, I mean, there are all kinds of, you know, we maybe go into it one day but there's so many deep seated reasons why, you know, construction and architecture has gone wrong in the uk. But the net result is that many of us have to accept spaces which are our own from a legal point of view, but psychologically really are far outside what we're really like and who we really are. And that's why there's so much daydreaming about good architecture. There's not that much daydreaming about food because on the whole we can go out and get the food we want. But boy or boy is there dreams about spaces and design.
- [25:34]
B
You have built this house, you may be able to pick up a little bit of drilling in the background. Even you're in the process of still building it. You built your previous house as well. And then of course you've built quite a few houses through your project. Living Architecture. From a psychological standpoint, you picked up on the idea that you're trying to recreate your childhood home in some way. But is there also something about leaving a legacy in some way? I mean, a friend of mine observed that he felt his parents were later in their lives somehow building mausoleums. These very solid concrete brick structures, wanting to have an imprint on the world somehow. Do you identify with that?
- [26:15]
A
No. I've got many pathologies. Fortunately, that one's, you know, the kind of the pharaonic impulse. No, I mean, I think, you know, we'll all be waste matter very quickly and, you know, no one will think of us. So I don't think of it that way. But it is, I mean it is rather striking how long houses stick around for and we'd be fools to know what will happen in a Space. So it's very odd to inhabit a space where no one has been before, a space where there might have been a brownfield site or a shed or something like that. And you think, I'm the first person to be in this room. This wasn't a room before, but that room may carry on for 500 years. And there'll be all sorts of activities. I mean, unimaginable activities. I mean, if you said to an average Victorian, think that one day, I don't know, a lawyer from Singapore will be, you know, will have divided up your front room and, you know, for them it will be a multimillion pound little house. But, you know, they'll be much richer than you, but they'll be living in a corner of your house and the servants quarters will be where, you know, a skillful doctor now lives with, you know, her family. These will all be really surprising things. So we can't know what's gonna happen to the houses we're in.
- [27:28]
B
Well, as a result of that, Alanda, is there a duty for us to build in a certain way with longevity in mind?
- [27:37]
A
Yes. I mean, look, I think one of the things the Victorians did teach us is flexible spaces. Really last, if you can take off the skin, you've still got the bones and the bones are good, then you can do an awful lot. So there's warehouses, for example, that the Victorians did a lot of. They've become all sorts of things, offices, homes, showrooms, blah, blah. And yeah, whereas, so flexibility of space, good bones is, I think, what you can probably bequeath future generations and then. But I mean, we may be living in bits of data, really, and there may not be humans in 200 years time. So who knows the concept of a home, there may be only virtual space. Only virtual space may be necessary.
- [28:19]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So if we are designing a house or building something or refurbishing something, how do we know that we're doing it for ourselves and for internal reasons rather than for external validation?
- [28:34]
A
I mean, there's almost as a moral tone to your question. External validation bad. Internal validation good. I think it's fine for it to be an attempt to communicate with the world. And so in that sense it is about a search, maybe for external validation. I mean, one of the sort of ticklish areas is, what do you want people to say? People have housewarming parties. That's telling you something you want to say, I live here and in a way, judge me for my space. Judge me kindly, but please judge me because it is you know, these are a few lines of autobiography and I want them to be read. Then we can get into what someone saying. And could one do, you know, I'm a psychotherapist as of relatively recently, and you could do a psychotherapy of somebody's house. There's a wonderful American psychotherapist called Irving Yalom who says at one point in one of his books that he always asks to see his clients houses. He wants to see where they're living, what he doesn't want. Now, that's fairly unorthodox way of going about psychotherapy. But it's onto something really interesting, which is spaces are telling you such a large amount about a person, and that's okay. They'll be telling you about the healthy bits and the unhealthy bits.
- [29:53]
B
He's a man after my own heart. I think when we sort of move our furniture around or we endlessly rearrange things on the mantelpiece and so on, that we all do. We try and get the spacing exactly right.
- [30:05]
A
I don't think we. I mean, we. But not everyone, when one does. Yeah.
- [30:11]
B
What is one trying to achieve with
- [30:13]
A
that, do you think? I mean, it's a fascinating thing that one's trying to translate something inside into something outside. Right. And that, you know, you're noticing that the ornament is. When you say it's wrongly placed, I guess we're thinking there's something about the way that it's placed which is not capturing our ideals of a good life. It, you know, it's currently suggesting maybe a pinched and unkind way of looking at things, or it's pretentious or it's, you know, something is like it's wrong. But again, how nice not to care. But some of us care.
- [30:54]
B
And what about, you know, so many of us cohabit as well?
- [30:57]
A
Of course.
- [30:58]
B
Then what happens? Right? Because you're trying to.
- [31:00]
A
All hell breaks loose.
- [31:01]
B
All hell breaks loose.
- [31:02]
A
I mean, I mean, so often it's an area of serious conflict. If you're really lucky, you and your special friend will share an aesthetic and you can sort of double down on it and explore it and it becomes a fantastic joint project. In the history of design, there have been those sort of relationships, I imagine, you know, Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson, when things were going well for them, they might really have sort of enjoyed decorating spaces. Some of the Bloomsbury people, et cetera. You know, there's some wonderful examples. But on the whole, one person wants to go one way, the other person Wants to go another way. And there are real conflicts over mugs and chairs and rugs and colors and all sorts of things. So it's one of the places in which the differences between people can find their most unhappy articulations.
- [31:54]
B
I wonder how we solve that.
- [31:56]
A
I think one of the things is to go into the reasons why someone likes something. If somebody brings home a rug that seems hideous to you, rugs going, it's hideous. Say, why do you like it? Why do you think you like it? What is it speaking to you of? What are the values? And then sometimes the backstory is really interesting. Someone might go, my mother was depressed when I was a child and no one laughed. And this rug with its mouth shaped designs and bright, vivid purple and pink scattered decorated bits, speaks to me of smiling and a good humor in the face of adversity. And I've needed that so much. And one might be so moved by this that one would almost like the rug. Almost, yeah.
- [32:51]
B
You're not convincing me, but yeah, almost. Let's move on to this idea of belonging.
- [32:55]
A
Yeah.
- [32:56]
B
The families, it seems to me, are more dispersed than maybe they've ever been. Certainly my experience as well is that my friends from my childhood now live in all sorts of cities around the world. I'm always questioning how do I find which particular quadrant on the earth I should settle in and belong in. How do I go about that? Why there? Why not somewhere else?
- [33:20]
A
Yeah, I agree. I think we have choice. And in an area where in the past we didn't have choice. And choice means we've got to find reasons in ourselves, conscious reasons, where in the past it was just the choice was made for us. Same is true in dating. In the olden days, people would just be told, like, this is your partner, that's the next 70 years of your life, that's it till death. Now people are in agony because they're allowed to choose from 10,000 people and they don't know how to choose. And once they've chosen, they think, oh, but what about maybe somebody else was better, et cetera. And you just cannot choose. So total freedom is really quite dizzying. Look, I think for many, many people there, there are ultimately reasons. Work is a huge thing. Property prices, friends, connections, et cetera. I think what we're always doing is looking for things that will anchor us to a place we actually want to be tied down a bit. It's wonderful to have a compelling reason to be somewhere.
- [34:27]
B
Do you see it as valuable to commit yourself to one place for a prolonged period? Of time and just give that a go. Because you do see people that are continually moving and trying to put down roots and it doesn't quite work for them. I wonder if there's a value in just committing and saying, okay, well, because isn't it about the social connections actually in the end?
- [34:47]
A
I mean, anthropologists have a great time with this one. They'll say that some people are harking back to the hunter gatherers and they're always on the move. And others are harking back to agricultural, the settled people. And that this picks up two kinds of things in human nature, the farmer and the hunter. So those who move are hunters and those who stay are farmers. And that reflects something long standing in us. I think we get this sometimes when we go traveling, when we go on holiday and you look up at a lit window in a street in Athens or Amsterdam or somewhere and you think, I wonder what it'd be like to live there. And for a moment your world slightly wobbles and you think, why do I live where I live? I could just live somewhere else. In actual fact, very few of us really get the chance to do that. There are ties that bind, ties of language and tradition and educational qualifications that are not transferable, etc. It's actually very hard to make your life in a new area. But it's one of the great fantasies. And I think when we go traveling, it's often the fantasy that underpins the sort of relationship to a place. What would it be like to have a home here?
- [36:04]
B
Totally, yeah. So interesting. Safety, another big word. As someone who is sensitive to your surroundings as you've described, for people that maybe don't think about this so much for you, what are the characteristics of a space that make it feel psychologically safe?
- [36:25]
A
Would you say that it's clean, that it's ordered, that it's not nostalgic? I do have a problem. I mean, I studied history. I'm very interested in the past. Lots of good things have happened, lots of. I'm not someone who only wants to live right now. But it is peculiar that when it comes to spaces, I generally don't want to see old things. And it's odd and that I'm afraid of slipping into an old world that I associate with bad stuff. And bad stuff is a kind of hidebound nature, an ungenerous nature, a class bound nature. The worst sides of. If you said to somebody, the old world, what are the bad associations I have that when I encounter many, many old things. So it's Strange, it's not universal. I love an old church. I can go to a historic house and see the point of it when it comes to my own environment, places where I've got to sleep. If I'm choosing a hotel, I've. I don't want to go to Edinburgh's finest old hotel dating back to 1600. I definitely don't want to be there at all. If I'm in Bristol, I don't want to be in Bristol's quaint Tudor Beethan thing. I definitely want to be in the modern hotel, maybe in the outskirts of town, maybe in the New Docklands area or whatever. I mean, it's very strange. I think I'm afraid of getting stuck in the back pages of a Dickens novel and being very unhappy.
- [38:16]
B
That's so interesting. And what about the characteristics in terms of things like materials and light and things like that?
- [38:22]
A
So brightness is hugely important. I'm afraid of darkness, I guess, being swallowed up by the dark. So I'm afraid of being swallowed up by the past and I'm afraid of being swallowed up by the dark. And these are good questions to ask, as it were. What are you afraid of? Is a really, really good question to ask. Why did you pick that glass? Or what are you afraid of in other glasses? What might happen in that fork or whatever? So it's a really good question. And so I'm afraid of darkness, I'm afraid of mess, I'm afraid of ancientness. And I'm looking to be pulled in other directions in the environments I feel comfortable in.
- [38:59]
B
So interesting. And then when this thing about clutter and about tidying up, you know, Marie Kondo has been a huge hit in the world of tidying up.
- [39:10]
A
Yeah.
- [39:11]
B
On a psychological level, what do you make of that?
- [39:15]
A
Well, if you feel chaotic, you're going to need very, very ordered environments to feel calm in. And I don't think it's a coincidence that as the world has become ever more chaotic and troubled, this thing called minimalism has cropped up. Why do we enjoy the paintings of Agnes Martin or Mark Rothko? Why did minimalism start up in America at a time of huge chaos and noise? There's a wonderful German theorist at the turn of the 20th century called Wilhelm Voringer who wrote a book called Abstraction and Empathy. And in this book he speculated on why different ages have been drawn to either a very exuberant, very rich style or a very pared down style and very much performed a kind of psychological analysis of different ages need different things from their built environment. If you think of the Victorians, they were constructing a modern world that was terrifying to them and because it was really so perturbing of all settled certainties. And so it kicked off this very peculiar nostalgia for the Gothic and the Middle Ages and Venice and all sorts of things that still mar the skyline, in my view. And this was very different from the Georgians in the 18th century. Modernity was exciting. And so one can look at certain Georgian buildings and think, my goodness, this is an ultra modern, sleek, pared down machine. And then the Victorians, you know, clearly something happens in the sort of geopolitical world, which means in the spiritual world, which means that that kind of architecture becomes impossible for them and they want something else.
- [41:08]
B
So if you didn't live in a modern house, would you go Georgian?
- [41:12]
A
Yes. Yeah, yes.
- [41:14]
B
Because you think there's a modernity to it, the spaces.
- [41:16]
A
Yeah, absolutely. And that is a fascinating thing that you can look at Roman architecture. And Roman architecture is in many ways, to our eyes, modernist because it's pared down, because ancient Rome was a very noisy place, so they felt a need that's quite similar to ours. So you can refind the sort of values, the design values that sit under. The term modernism can be found in all ages, at all times in China, in the west, et cetera. It's not really just architecture of the last hundred years. It's a sensibility that crops up, for example, in monasticism. So you could look at a monastery built in 1200 that is utterly in line with Le Corbusier in terms of what the building's trying to do and the needs it's trying to address. Psychologically, it's the same thing.
- [42:08]
B
Yeah, yeah. I often think of John Paulson. He always says his favorite building is
- [42:13]
A
it the Cistercian Abbey.
- [42:14]
B
It's Cistercian Abbey in Provence. Or Waleshood.
- [42:16]
A
That's right, that's right. Le Torrenay.
- [42:18]
B
Le Torrenay, which I've been to and is. So there's a real purity to it, isn't there?
- [42:22]
A
Yeah, yeah. So John Paulson could say, as Mark Rothko said of Turner, that guy really stole a lot from me. So John Paulson could have said, yeah, the builders of La Torrenne, they stole a lot from me.
- [42:40]
B
A lot of the people I speak to have quite defined routines and rituals within their home, myself included, actually. How do you think routines somehow give meaning to life at home?
- [42:52]
A
Look, living is an extraordinary thing. To maintain faith with the sort of basic constituents of life requires quite a lot of make believe. I mean, we could die at any moment. That our carefully constructed matchstick lives could fall apart at any moment. And we take them so seriously and we think we've got a name and that we've got a purpose and we think we own things, but actually all these things are kind of illusions, they're fictions made between people to suggest.
- [43:22]
B
Oh, comedy. Doorbell.
- [43:26]
A
Someone may need. Is that all right? Just let anyone in. If there's a delivery, just put it down anywhere. Not on the kitchen table though, because that would be another disaster.
- [43:41]
B
I love that.
- [43:42]
A
That's the thing about modern houses now. There's just everything is computerized. Silly things like the doorbell is bloody computerized. And then of course, no one knows where the website is and everyone's forgotten the codes and you know, okay, so. So it's very odd being alive on a spinning rock, some distant corner of the Milky Way. And we try and suppress the mystery of existing by having routines and having a thing called breakfast and having a place where you keep your cereal. We just try and use these things to stop us going nuts. But yeah, it's a fiction. We have a tidy little order. We're sort of polishing our matchstick on the side of the Titanic. Yeah.
- [44:23]
B
So how do we know if we're not overdoing it with our routines and becoming sort of over routineized somehow?
- [44:30]
A
This is where we need friends and partners. You know, the role of friend and partner is, you know, we're always in danger of losing perspective. Right. And so just someone to point out not just that we've got spinach in our teeth, but that we're on the edge of madness, that it really doesn't matter that the forks are not aligned or that there's a mark on the wall or that, you know, supper's a bit late or something like this. Because I think this disease called ocd, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. A lot of people will joke and go, I'm a bit ocd. Well, welcome to the club. I mean, it's a glorious club. I think with my psychotherapy hat on. The reason why people develop OCD is always the same. It's that they've experienced great lack of safety and a lack of love, if we can put it broadly. Love is the great insulator. Literally creates a, a bubble, a home around somebody. If you surround encase a person in love, they don't need so much casing of architecture. So it's the loveless who go to furniture shops as well as it were childhood especially.
- [45:32]
B
So. Interesting. Can you think of a way of setting up or constructing a home around the idea of love.
- [45:42]
A
I mean, if you could do a translation exercise, I mean, what is love? What are the values associated with interpersonal love? It would be things like listening, being listened to, care, gentleness, consideration, lots and lots of lovely adjectives. And you could think, okay, well, let's try and translate all those adjectives in the language of furnishings and design. What is an empathetic space, etc. What is an empathetic window, etc. And this could sound very abstract, but it's not, not actually as abstract as all that. I mean, there are fascinating exercises you can do. You can show somebody five drinking glasses and go, which one's conservative, which one's liberal and which one's heading towards fascism or something? And sometimes you can think, yeah, you can have a jolly good shot at that. And you can get 20 people to perform that exercise and they'll more or less say the same thing. So there really are principles that emerge from, from shapes. And to create a loving space is to create a space which maximally, you know, heightens those loving adjectives in the language of design.
- [46:52]
B
Yeah. I want to ask you about living architecture. And for those who are not familiar with it, could you just briefly describe what that is?
- [47:02]
A
So it's an organization that has built a range of modern houses which can be rented out for holidays. So for viewers who know about something called the Landmark Trust, it's like a landmark trust, but in modern architecture. And there are houses dotted around the UK and some wonderful names like John Porson, like Peter Zumthor and others, Michael Hopkins, have designed the houses. And it's a chance to not, just as it were, be on holiday, but experience a space designed by people who care passionately about spaces and are trying to give you a certain sort of experience.
- [47:43]
B
That word experience, I think is very apt. Why do you want people to be able to experience what you would think of as good modern architecture rather than just look at it?
- [47:53]
A
Right. I mean, there is something about experiencing space over a 24 hour period. Why do people love being in hotels more than, let's say, just being in a restaurant? The great thing about being in a hotel is that for a certain amount of time you can shut the door and you can be in that space, get undressed, you can sing a song, you can jump up and down on the bed. You can really make that space yours in a way you can't when you're merely passing through a cultural center or whatever. And my personal motivation for, for the organization was to allow as many people as possible to have that experience that they wouldn't otherwise be able to have. We can go, especially in places like London, you can go to lots and lots of very lovely spaces. On the whole, you can't spend the night there. And with all the things that happen in the night, there's quite a lot of sort of magic when you fall asleep somewhere and when you wake up somewhere. These are very intimate moments. And our senses are very, very heightened at those moments. And so when a space is interesting, you get an extra kick from it, I think.
- [49:01]
B
So you have built probably 10 or so houses, I think, in your life.
- [49:07]
A
I've been involved in the building of.
- [49:09]
B
Been involved in the building of. So you've probably learned a few things.
- [49:12]
A
Not as many as I would have liked. I've learned how to work with architects.
- [49:17]
B
Yeah. How do you work with an architect?
- [49:20]
A
Really appreciate how tough it is for them to have a client. They don't really want a client. I mean, they say they do, but really they want to do it their way. And clients are a terrible nuisance. And the more you can just be honest about that and apologize all the time, say, I'm so sorry that I'm ruining your fun and saying those things. They don't want an opinion. So that at the end of the day, the construction industry is really where it all happens. You're in the hands of your builders. It's an odd kind of marriage. Most of the time, you don't know who you're getting married to when you team up with a building firm. And there are some great ones, and there are a lot of really substandard ones or ones who are so fragile because they're affected by the economy, et cetera, that they can't give you the guarantees that you need as a client to get a project properly off the ground.
- [50:10]
B
Because the decision to build. Build a house, it seems to me, is a very optimistic act, isn't it? And yet the process somehow has a habit of grinding you down. How do you hold onto that optimism? You know, someone like you has done it quite a few times. How do you keep going?
- [50:28]
A
I mean, you know, Kevin MacLeod wouldn't be the legendary figure he is if the whole thing was easy. It is clearly nightmarish, and people love grand designs precisely for that contrast between the beautiful fantasy and the nightmarish journey towards that fantasy. And, yeah, I mean, it unfortunately shouldn't be, but it is slightly. For the foolhardy and the passionate and the slightly unhinged. You know, there was A young writer that apparently went up to the French writer Andre Gide and said, should I become a writer? And this senior French literary figure went, only if you have to. And I think the same would probably hold true for architecture. Should you build a house? Well, only if you have to. Otherwise, don't. And by have to, I really mean psychologically, if it's really hard for you not to. And I think there are people up and down the country who are passionate and they do this slightly irrespective of sanity, probably driving everybody close to them mad. But, yeah, so it's a. It's a passion project, I'd say.
- [51:34]
B
Yeah.
- [51:35]
A
It shouldn't be. It's so sad that it has to be. After all, no one would think someone who chose their own clothes as a passionate, demented person, they just think we're just getting dressed somehow. When it comes to the dressing of our domestic spaces, the economics, the procedures around it make it for the foolhardy.
- [51:53]
B
Have you got any advice about how you would go about coming up with a brief for a house? If you are going to build one, obviously you've got to select your architect and presumably you'd maybe meet with a few different ones and see who you got on well with. And to some extent, you're adopting what they do stylistically, but still, they're looking to you as the client to tell them what you really want. Having done that a few times, where do you start? What's the list? What do they get from you? And what would be your advice?
- [52:24]
A
Well, you know, there's that moment where Louis Kahn, the American architect, once held up a brick during a seminar and he went, what does a brick want? And it was a sort of strange question, like, what on earth does that mean, what a brick want? Brick doesn't want anything. But, yeah, I think what he was pointing to is that certain materials, but then also, by extension, certain spaces, ask certain things of them. So I think that very often architects, but also clients, design with spaces in mind. So if you've got a property in Lancashire, that property might be asking for something. If you've got a property in an urban location in Portsmouth, it might be asking for something else. So it just slightly depends what the environment is doing and is asking for, and it might pull you in one direction rather than another. So I think it's. Look, it's an intuitive question, how do we decide what we want to eat? Sometimes we need a menu to look at and we sort of open the fridge and you think, I don't know what I want to eat. But if someone showed you a menu, you. You think, oh, I know I'm in a fish sort of mood, because the word fish has sort of triggered an acknowledgement. So if nothing's coming up spontaneously, obviously one of the great pleasures is to look at other people's houses. And the Internet's made this just amazing that there's so much that we can look at. And it could be everything from a 13th century castle to a Tuscan hilltop thing to a modernist apartment in New York, whatever it is. And just to look out for those moments when you think, yeah, that's it. Something here that I'm envious of. Envy is quite a good guide to your suppressed desires. Every time someone shows you an environment and you think, why have they got it and not me showing you that there's a bit of you lodged in somebody else's project, and you should probably go and fish it out and copy it and get it back to you.
- [54:10]
B
How many people have stayed in your living architecture projects, do you reckon? Over the years? A lot of people.
- [54:15]
A
A lot of people. I mean, many, many thousands.
- [54:16]
B
Many thousands.
- [54:17]
A
Many, many.
- [54:18]
B
What would you say is the biggest thing that you've learned from the whole project?
- [54:22]
A
I think the nicest thing is that on a good day, people really do have a special time, that they'll respond to their environment in exactly the ways in which those who constructed the space would have hoped for, and they come back energized. These are houses where sometimes big decisions are made. Sometimes you need to go away from your home and in order to rethink your life. It's an odd thing, but again, tradition of monasticism was precisely that you can't necessarily liberate yourself from certain thoughts unless you put yourself in a new environment. And sometimes a beautiful, accomplished house can be the place where you rethink what you want from your career or the rest of your life or your relationship to others. I find those moments very moving evidence of that. Very moving.
- [55:10]
B
And final question. If someone listening to this or watching this feels somehow unsettled or restless at home at the moment, dissatisfied, what would be your advice to them psychologically rather than practically, do you think?
- [55:30]
A
I mean, like so many other, you know, psychological challenges, to know that one's not alone, that however peculiar that feeling seems to be, or however, you know, as often we don't take our problems as seriously as we need to, so you might think, oh, I'm just a bit dissatisfied with the color of the sofa. Actually, we took that seriously. What that means is like, you know, maybe you're not quite in your element anymore in this place that you thought was home. And if you can learn to take that seriously, you can start to do something about it. But until you do take it seriously, it stuck at the level of a joke or an obsession, an unfair obsession. So I think that our relationship to spaces are often signaling how we're doing in our lives more broadly. And there may come a time when we need to move home, as it were, or recreate a home in a different way, that the home that's kept us safe until now has run out of steam. And we need to do that very difficult but heroic and wonderful thing, which is to go out and create a new home for ourselves.
- [56:37]
B
Yeah, I completely agree with that. And I've sort of concluded that actually it's okay if a home suits us for a particular life stage, but it may well not be forever.
- [56:49]
A
You know, I think we have a hard time accepting this in many areas of life. We want every relationship to last forever, but that's an unfair demand. I mean, think of our relationship to literature. You can have a wonderful time with a book, but if you were made to read that book all the time, it would drive you mad. You know, we realized that we needed to read that book at that time. Similar thing can accompany, let say, our relationship to our friends. Certain friends we may grow out of. They carried us to a certain place, we carried them to a certain place, and now that place has been reached and we go in different directions. Same is true of houses. We may need to say, you know, thank you. And sometimes people speak to rooms. It's quite a nice, sweet thing. People. People say goodbye to hotel rooms. Sometimes you might need to say goodbye to a home and say thank you. Thank you for taking me here, but now I'm moving on.
- [57:35]
B
Well, on that note, thank you for having us here.
- [57:37]
A
Thank you so much.
- [57:38]
B
Fascinating.
- [57:39]
A
Thanks.
- [57:42]
B
Thanks very much for listening, folks. I've been interviewing, interviewing people for about 25 years or so now, and I must admit I've never met anyone quite as articulate as Alain. So I very much hope you enjoyed that. Alan was kind enough to invite me into his home, of course, for this conversation, but he's very private, so we didn't record a house tour this time. However, if you do enjoy looking around other people's houses, you may be interested in our roster of video tours over on Patreon. So head to patreon.com homingwithmat to take a look at those. We've got some stellar guests coming up. Film directors, chefs, fashion designers, and all sorts of other folks. So I'd encourage you to tap the follow button and subscribe to the show. If you don't already do that. You can also watch the video versions of all of our podcasts on YouTube at. Homing with Matt. This episode was produced by Pod Shop with music by Simeon Walker. Thanks all and we'll be back again next week. Bye.