Home grown citrus fruit would not materialize until years in the future, however. For the duration, this unheated room with its unheated floor would be my temporary kitchen, while Michael socked his way through the building of the permanent kitchen which, we now knew, would be the heart of our cooking school.
Michael installed a large, shallow ceramic sink around the corner and at one end of the room, lined the walls with shelving, and once my two small gas stoves, the refrigerator and all my kitchen equipment were installed it was cosy and efficient, like a kitchen on a boat. Everything was out where I could see it and within easy reach, the way I like it, and the blue and ochre timbered walls, the old brick floor and my copper pots hanging above the stove gave it a certain style.
The day Michael began work on the kitchen was one of those red-letter moments. I know he dreaded the job because it was massive and would require not only superhuman strength, but super-human patience as he turned a series of sixteenth-century rooms into one, cohesive kitchen. He carefully sealed off the space with plastic, tape and curtains and proceeded to go at it with satisfying hammer-blows as he bashed down walls and the old, crumbling fireplace, pulled up tiles and generally turned the space into a shambles. A wall with two beautiful long windows that had divided the former kitchen from Michael’s workshop disappeared, as did an angled wall at the back and another one to the side. The result was one huge space that stretched from the street to the back courtyard. Destruction, the easy part, took weeks. Once everything was a mound of rubble the real work began as Michael hauled it out, tons of it, dustbin by huge dustbin. He found someone who needed landfill, which helped enormously, as the city dump allows just one visit per person per day.
It took months of backbreaking labour to get it all cleaned out. Then Michael ran pipes and wiring through the floor before he poured a concrete pad at the end of the room: this would remain his workshop. With nothing in the space but Michael’s tools it looked large, airy, wonderful. Joe was soon in there on his roller blades, swirling around the obstacles of Michael’s paraphernalia.
Michael had completed kitchen plans before he began demolition, and he pored over them at night after working in the space all day, tweaking them as it opened up. The planning stage had been a torturous process for me: I don’t have the gift of being able to visualize space. When I look at plans on paper I see flat drawings on paper. When I look at an empty space I see just that – an empty space. But I do know what I need in a kitchen to work well and efficiently: a big centre island with a butcher block and a sink; my knives handy without being in the way or accessible to small fingers; pots and pans and certain utensils hung where I can reach them; lots of full-extension drawers; enough room to accommodate a crowd.
I have ideas about the way I want a kitchen to look, ideas which have to do with colour and warmth and being able to display some of my favourite things like the gorgeous wedding cookies tied with pale blue ribbon that were a gift when I was in Sardinia, the jar of jewel-like candied fruit from Apt, photographs of the children at work in the kitchen, strands of garlic and Espelette peppers, a frothy bunch of pink peppercorns, bay leaves, shallots. I communicated all of this to Michael, who knew it all already, and beyond that I was pretty hopeless. Oh, I read kitchen design books but found most spaces in them cold and impersonal. Flipping through French magazines I found some design elements I loved, and these went into a file for Michael, along with my ideas and observations. He referred to them all when he drew up the plan, going so far as to making a paper ‘maquette’, or model, so that I could see, in three dimensions, what he was talking about.
A year of demolition and cleaning up, of concrete-pad pouring and figuring had passed before Michael began the construction phase of the kitchen. He worked on it slowly and steadily, his brow knitted most of the time as he puzzled out the intricate details. It was very slow going, but fortunately one of Michael’s many gifts is persistence. He worked and worked for months, grumbling and cursing, hammering and sawing, measuring and figuring. There was a point where I could see it was getting the better of him and, one night, after Joe was in bed, I suggested we rethink the plans. I’d had my doubts about a bank of cabinets he’d drawn in on each side of the stove in a ziggurat pattern. He was trying to give me maximum storage and light at the same time, but each time I looked at them on paper they seemed top-heavy and complicated.
I suggested, gently, that I didn’t need the cabinets, knowing that Michael had spent a lot of time figuring, measuring and planning to fit them in. Surprisingly, he agreed easily, and with a swipe of his eraser the cabinets were gone and the kitchen lightened up. It is very hard to work on a project such as the one we had naively embarked upon – and to live in it as well; to have the husband be the contractor and the crew while the wife is the dreamer and the breadwinner. Anyone who has been through a similar situation will sympathize – it is one of the ultimate tests of marriage. Throw in a foreign country, metric measurements, a toddler and my frequent absences for work, and the situation becomes even more like dry tinder.
Michael and I were managing, but it required extreme delicacy on my side and extreme organization on his. He is a master at keeping construction messes separate from our living area through his system of plastic, tape and curtains, so that as little dust and noise as possible escape into our lives. I have always appreciated this about him. I am very good at keeping out of his way, both when he is designing and when he works, something he appreciates about me. Still, there were times when I wanted to scream at the noise and puffs of dust that inevitably escaped, and there were times when he wanted to, I am certain, walk out and close the door behind him. But each time we lost patience we stepped back, took a deep breath and really looked at what was happening. Progress was being made, spaces were changing, the bones of the kitchen were in place and it was all taking shape. Observation like this gave each of us renewed energy.
One of the most exciting things about the project was a back porch that Michael had incorporated into the kitchen. To do this, he’d pushed out the back wall and put in glass doors, and pushed up the ceiling then roofed it with glass, which pulled light into the whole room. He’d removed a battered old small-paned metal window that I loved, and painstakingly built two replicas using wood and wavy, antique glass. Michael’s brother David, a frequent visitor, helped finish them, and when they were installed they looked as though they had always been there.
Michael rebuilt the fireplace into a cooking fireplace, with a shelf in front wide enough to hold a dinner plate, and a beautifully graceful mantel and chimney. It was a tense job because, even though he’d already remodelled a fireplace that worked, he was building this one from scratch and he didn’t know how to guarantee it would draw. We asked friends who’d had fireplaces installed, and all their suggestions pointed in one direction – make the fireplace itself deep enough to build a fire towards the back so the smoke has nowhere to go but up. A book about chimney-building confirmed this and, using calculations he found there as his compass, Michael constructed an entirely smokeless fireplace.
Michael was about to do a final plastering on the fireplace when a friend called to ask if he wanted an old coal stove. Michael went to take a look, only to discover that what he was being offered wasn’t any old stove, it was a vintage Aga cooker in mint condition. Our friend just wanted to get rid of it, and said if Michael would take it off his hands, he could have it. Michael jumped at it.
I was in the United States on a book-tour at the time, and when I called that day and Michael told me what he’d just been given I was so excited I could hardly stand it. Both Michael and I had spent significant years of our childhoods in England, where each of us had eaten oatmeal, soups, stews and breads cooked in the oven of an Aga, and heard our mothers extol the virtues of this heavy, cast-iron stove. We’d both wanted one for years.
Our friend needed the Aga out of the apartment building and Michael called three friends to help him move it. They took a sturdy dolly that Michael had built, hoisted the heavy stove up on it and pushed it uphill from our friend’s building to the house, a journey of about five blocks. One of them played traffic policeman as they huffed and puffed and somehow shimmied and wrestled it into our courtyard, then into the house. I took a photo of them from my