Home as bolt-hole (‘Don’t tell anyone I live here’)

BRIT-THINK: There is beauty (and safety) in anonymity ... which may explain why middle-class dwellings from one end of the country to the other are nearly identical. Brits in every income-bracket short of the very top dislike domestic ostentation, and decline to call attention to their homes (‘just so long as it’s tidy’). They are happiest with formula floor-plans and ‘traditional’ features. From Washington New Town to Weybridge, proud owners peep from behind net curtains and leaded lights.

Round about the 1920s, a little-known architectural genius designed the first-ever bay-windowed semi-detached. A grateful nation has reproduced it ever since (with only minor modifications) from Cornwall to Aberdeen. It is etched on the nation’s consciousness; felt to be the perfect dwelling, and the one which best suits and accommodates the British Way of Life. It is somehow right. The only thing ‘righter’ is a (period) house in the country, if you can afford one. But flats are not right – nor are open-plan rooms, double-volume spaces, warm-air central heating, soaring two-storey widows or radical design-statements. These are regarded as architectural perversions, which inevitably distort life within. Even the Prince of Wales gets publicly sarky every time he spots too much glass.

Brit-homes have no equipment at all. Somewhere in the backs of Brit-minds, an indoor loo-with-low-flush-mechanism is still perceived as a ‘luxury’ (the most over-used word in the estate agent’s lexicon). The heating system doesn’t work, though exposed radiators deface every wall-surface, and scald the cat. For reasons few can explain, Brits will spend many happy hours reading and talking in front of a false fireplace. (They are irresistibly drawn to any hint of neo-Georgian fibreboard surrounding an area of blank wall.) This is Spiritually Right, and reinforces traditional family values. Home is where the hearth isn’t.

Brits haven’t much need for interior designers, since the last thing they’re after is showiness, idiosyncrasy or display. (That’s reserved for gardens and ‘grounds’). Only two decorative themes are allowable, and these are repeated the length and breadth of the nation:

1. For the affluent, aspirational, or upwardly mobile:

The ‘country house’ style. This calls for a great deal of antique furniture (‘repro’ if you can’t afford the real thing), dark woods (mahogany is favoured), gilded mirrors, floral fabrics and swagged velvets, well-worn Oriental rugs (nothing new, and never ‘washed Chinese’) and subdued colour-schemes. Anything, in fact, which looks inherited and suggests Old Money. Can be scruffy, since Old Money often is.

2. For everyone else:

Post Second World War Ugly.

Main design-feature is carpets, fabrics and wallpapers which jar horribly, and look as if they’ve ended up in the same room only because of ‘shortages’. (Brit-style seems permanently circumscribed by the post-war period.) Favoured colour-schemes run to avocado-cream-brown, or alternatively black-with-orange blobs. Or both.

Some like it hot

The greatest single difference between Brits and Yanks is in common perceptions of heat and cold. It seems that natives of each country possess internal thermometers – acquired at the moment of birth – which remain unchanged even if they spend many years abroad. Accents and attitudes may alter, but thermometers never do.

Americans are cold in Britain from the moment their planes touch down at Heathrow. They’re cold outdoors, and even colder in. But they’re coldest of all in the bathroom.

Brits, while sympathetic at first, soon grow impatient with shivering Yanks, and advise them to wear more clothing. Americans pay scant attention. They hold the view that clothes are for aesth.etic and fashion purposes only, and should not be required to do the job for which central heating was intended. They flatly refuse suggestions of thermal vests from Marks and Sparks. Primitive to don extra layers when you can put up a thermostat. Anyway – after years of wholemeal diets and ‘workout with weights’, who needs to look fat? So, they continue to huddle miserably by heaters, and soon reach the conclusion that the refrigerator is the only thing in the average British home which is never cold.