A Space in a Space: Crafting and Living Home

The chapter narrates the journey of the author from imagining spaces into the empty spaces of his house, into crafting them and dwelling in them through the renovation and conversion of a late Victorian house and garden. In the embodied awareness of the craftsman, the designer and the user, the examined house expresses challenges along the journey of three different processes that have occurred simultaneously: imagining an ideal home as a user, translating this imagination as a designer and materialising these designs by making and fitting them within the existing spaces. The house originally constructed in 1886 is typical of period dwellings of this time. A traditional stone building, one and a half storeys high, semi-detached and set within a stone-walled garden, was relatively intact at the time of acquisition with many period features remaining. Significant upgrading of the original fabric was needed but more recent changes, most significantly the conversion of an attic roof space to bedrooms, had detrimentally impacted the quality and integrity of the original house. However, there remained significant potential for future interventions to build on the remaining qualities of the original fabric and the potential to transform the living environment connecting the house with its garden. Budget limitations necessitated that the conversion work would need to be undertaken as a self-build project and this provided the opportunity to use the house as an experimental test bed for comparatively unskilled, craft-based processes. Unpredictable changes along the route of this journey were merged into an organic process of the same body-mind that was testing the limits of the architectural profession and inhabitation through an applied practice. Living through crafting and crafting through living suggests ways of creating spaces that transpose atmospheres of attuning the mind and the body of the person into new open-ended ways of thinking, crafting and living.