The wall went up in a single day in March, and by the evening the first letter had been pushed through a door that was not yet hung. It is eleven metres of board-marked concrete, a little over three metres high, and it has no window, no number and no bell.4 From Alder Row the Havik house is simply the place where the street stops explaining itself. The planners, to their credit, understood exactly what was being proposed. One of them wrote in the margin of the application: this is not a façade, it is a refusal.
FIG. 04
Behind it the plan is almost embarrassingly generous. Each room borrows light from a court the size of a parking space, and the family eats, most evenings, with the doors folded away.5
“We did not want privacy. We wanted to stop performing a front garden.”Marit Havik, owner