Janet Street-Porter Building Sights

BBC Four Collections - archive

programmes chosen by experts.

For this collection, Janet Street-Porter has selected

programmes about post-war architecture.

More programmes on this theme

and other BBC Four Collections

are available on BBC iPlayer.

JANET STREET-PORTER: I'm so bored when I go to people's houses.

You know where every bloody room's going to be. It's so predictable.

So I didn't want to have a house that was anything to do with

that crappy old English tradition of,

you know,

the front door's here and the lights are there,

cos that's how they always have been.

I studied architecture in the '60s with Piers Gough

and I always wanted to live in

a house that was designed

by an architect who I admired.

And I gave up architecture cos I wasn't going to be as good as Piers.

I really rate him.

Piers did a couple of designs for the house.

This one was more elegant and it was also really spiky.

I just thought it was a really tough design

and, also,

I didn't want a house that was too friendly.

I didn't want a house that looked friendly -

I wanted a house that looked quite hostile.

I didn't want too many uninvited visitors.

The building fundamentally looks like the client. If you were asked,

"Who might this building belong to in London?"

I think...

you might guess.

In fact, you WOULD guess that it was Janet.

I wanted the house to be built in brick

and I hit on this idea of having it in all different coloured bricks,

so it looks as if a shadow's hit the building.

It's a kind of trompe-l'oeil effect.

So the bottom is darker and it gets paler as it goes up.

PIERS: Unfortunately, some commentators have pointed out that...

HE

CHUCKLES

..it may look more like rising damp coming up the building

than the sun coming down!

JANET: I think the stairs seem like a Mexican house.

They seem much more like an adobe house.

They don't seem like a British house at all.

It seems like

you're in New Mexico

or something.

All the external doors look like railway sleepers

and they have rope handles

and they have fake medieval

black nails in them.

And all the internal doors are studded with the same black nails.

It was supposed to look like that, kind of, Orson Welles...

Not Citizen Kane but Chimes At Midnight -

one of those, kind of, really crappy Orson Welles movies.

And still on a B-movie theme, the front door is made of

big, wooden timbers and it's got a rope handle

and I asked for a spyhole so I could

look at people.

Only trouble is that what's the right height for me

is about a foot higher than anybody else standing outside.

All the rooms on all the floors are different shapes

and none of them are boxed-in square.

I hate that more than anything.

This is my bedroom and before we'd even bought the land

or decided what the house would look like, I started to buy pictures.

I've collected things for years and years

but I started to collect pictures and I had a really clear idea in my mind

of what I wanted my bedroom to be like.

These are neoclassical engravings by Piranesi.

They're not of views of Rome, which is what most people know of his work.

They're of classical urns.

They're very restful.

And my bed is on a trolley.

It's on the kind of trolley

that British Rail deliver all their parcels on.

It's got wheels and a brake, of course,

so that I can turn it and look at different bits of my pictures,

according to what my mood is,

or I could look out the window.

And all the windows are different shapes.

So it's all full of things to look at.

I wanted a bath that was made out of rock. Nobody would build it.

And then I had a little think about it

and we ordered just the most giant bath I could get in there.

And then I really liked the standpipe so I thought,

"What do I want a tap for? It's just kind of funky.

So the bathroom look is kind of... It's supposed to be a joke.

Like, it's not finished, but it's not meant to be.

That's why the carpet stops short of the bath

and there are all the rocks under it.

There's a lot of steelwork in the house and it's all galvanised

so I wanted the kitchen to have the same kind of steel look about it,

so we painted the cupboards with Hammerite so they looked,

kind of, a bit wrecked.

It's got steel worktops and I used

1.99 little galvanised lintel-forming things

to make shelves for

my collection of

fish plates and fish moulds.

And when they were doing the walls,

they put this steel mesh up before they plastered it

and I thought it looked fabulous so I didn't bother plastering the kitchen.

That's the kind of look.

In fact, we put extra mesh up to make it look extra wrecked.

Outside here is the balcony, where I sit and have my breakfast

and get laughed at by lots of meat porters.

MAN: Hello, Janet!

The point of the living room is really just to create a space

that's very comfortable

and not forbidding, cos I think

a lot of architect-designed houses look very cold.

We bought a wood-burning stove

and I decided to put it in front of the windows,

so that when you were sitting on the sofa

you looked

out the window

and you had the fire, rather than the traditional way of looking at a wall,

which I thought was rather boring.

The radiators are all turned on their sides,

so that instead of being rather dreary objects

that sit along a non-existent skirting board,

they stand upright like columns

and they become features in the room.

I mean, they work just as well. They make quite a lot of gurgling

but they send out the same amount of heat.

And I also wanted to have a wooden floor that looked like a log jam

coming through the big window of

pieces of wood, just set randomly,

splaying out from the window in the concrete,

a bit like this woodcut over here.

But, unfortunately, English craftsmen aren't quite up to this just yet.

So what I've ended up with is a parquet rug.

It's like a real rug.

It's got a border all the way round.

The advantage of it over a real rug is that the corners don't curl up.

It's OK. It's not what I really wanted.

I said to Piers that I wanted to have the office at the top of the house

and then we put this steel staircase up

the back, both as a fire escape

and it's the only access to the office.

Now, that means that people can come and see me up here

without going in the house and I like the idea of going out to go to work.

'You know, even getting wet in the rain doesn't bother me.

'So it's completely self-contained up here.'

Presentation - I know that. Paul...

Well, at the moment, Paul McCartney's only approved three tracks.

'I can't remember how long it took to build the house.'

About nine months longer than it was meant to.

People have said, "Was it like having a baby?"

But as I haven't had a baby, I wouldn't really know.

I suppose it was a bit like giving birth to that alien in Alien,

when it bursts out of

John Hurt's chest!

That might be more appropriate.

There were terrible things happen, like the spiral staircase arrived and

it ended up turning the wrong way so you couldn't get off at this floor.

So people make mistakes. Human beings do, you know.

Has she never had to send a letter back to be typed again?

You know, really!

Most architects live in old houses.

Even the architect that designed this house doesn't live in a modern house.

And I think that unless you patronise modern architecture

and make a very positive statement, nobody will respond to it.

You've just got to be so proud of it and stick up for it,

cos it's had such a bad press,

and you have to show people that it's really great to live with.

It's just terrific.

It's much more enjoyable living here

than in some fake Georgian house or in some nasty little box.