Last year, Bath architect Willie Bertram built England’s ‘most expensive house’– the £35 million Hampstead residence of Israeli diamond dealer Lev Leviev. Also in London, and with a touch of James Bond, he’s building a house within a house for a wealthy client, turning the inside of an industrial-like shell into a disguised, three-storey mansion.
In The Architect’s Tale, he describes his encounters with some of the world’s richest, most interesting and eccentric people, some of them close to home. Wealthy clients, proper craftsmen, shrewd negotiators and doubting vicars line its pages so that what could be a self -serving monologue is modest and entertaining and one that an aspiring architect might read –not for the practicalities of the profession (this is a man who measures by pacing out his steps)but for the cautionary tales of unpaid bills and dodgy title deeds, of ancient plumbing and squabbling committees.
Bertram has a light touch and an ear for dialogue that makes the stories fly and, above all, he writes like he is still a geometry-mad schoolboy, in thrall to the beauty of buildings and the magical process of creating them – his children.
In his encounters with the Prince of Wales (he’s a favoured architect of the Prince), he describes what it’s like to work for the most demanding and possibly the best-informed of clients and for whom, among other things, he has created two pavilion retreats and other features at Highgrove, and a fairytale treehouse for the princes William and Harry.
Summoned to Virginia by the glamorous Patricia Kluge and her elderly husband – one of America’s richest men – he is wined and dined at their Albemarle estate and, in the rustic surroundings of John Kluge’s log cabin, learns how even the super-rich don’t like to part with their money. This is Bertram at his best. There is no English or professional disdain to cheapen the story, just a man made boggle-eyed by wealth and jet-leg, who lets his imagination run ahead of realities and returns home chastened but richer for the experience.
The Architect’s Tale describes how Bertram creates one of the world’s great hotels at Bath’s Royal Crescent and builds the Dower House in the garden –the first architect to be let loose on John Wood’s monumental heritage for 250 years. At Cliveden, the Astors’ country house in Berkshire, he makes a hotel from one of England’s great houses – redolent with memories of the Astors and the downfall of the Macmillan government at the hands of Christine Keeler. It’s here that his business partner John Tham marries the actress Jenny Agutter (not, however, before the local fire brigade is called upon to replenish ancient water tanks).
In Prague and on the cusp of a deal, his plans for the decaying Salm Palace fall foul of rival ownerships and the unresolved claims of European aristocracy in a post-communist world. At the little church in Bladon next to Blenheim, he redesigns the Churchill family plot. In designing an oriel window for a church in Long Ashton, Somerset, he reveals how extraordinary generosity restores faith and defeats infighting.
Bertram talks knowledgeably about architecture – and especially of the Classical tradition which he so loves – and describes how truly worthwhile buildings are created by an almost intuitive grasp of space and location, and dogged determination. His long, litigious and bitter battle with conservation groups opposed to Cavendish Lodge, his great neo-classical creation in Bath, is recounted blow by bloody blow. He says it nearly killed him and that he’ll never build in Bath again. Don’t count on it.
Stephen Morris
The Architect’s Tale, William Bertram, £18.99 (ISBN 978 1 906593 24 7), Redcliffe Press
