The Home I Never Built

The House I never Built

In 2005 I had been bitten by the home ownership bug as was socially expected having been married for more than 5 years and had two children.

I was open to conforming and joining the bandwagon of urban professionals but wanted to do it in a different way.

Many of my colleagues and age mates were buying pieces of land in god forsaken corners of the metropolitan where there were no roads, sewers, electricity, water, security, schools or even malls and being urban born and bred those were the non-negotiable minimums.

?So instead of taking bus rides deep into the bowels of the metropolitan I instead looked for a plot of land closer to the creature comforts I had become accustomed. I found a 5 acre block of land that was up for sale somewhere along Waiyaki Way a stone throw away from the highway and within the precincts of the city of Nairobi.

I then put together a concept to develop the piece of land so that I did not end up alone in the middle of nowhere as I had seen being done by many of my colleagues, to me, if I was going to own it then it had to be in an area that provided me with those creature comforts I mentioned earlier.

When I spoke to my colleagues and acquaintances about why they were obsessed with wanting to personally build their houses aka homes the most common reason was that they wanted to personalise the house to meet their unique requirements followed by the usual illusion that it was cheaper to build than buy ready made.

In the Beginning

My life started in Nairobi West, sometime in the late sixties, where I was exposed to the model of urban life that the Europeans had hoped we would become accustomed to such as doctors making house calls, kindergartens spread evenly so that no child needed to be picked at 6 am to get there and shops with the necessary amenities.

What might shock some of you is that I saw milk in glass bottles delivered to the doorstep by a milkman just like I saw happening when I would visit my grandparents in the village but taht was all before the tetrapack was marketed as a sign of affluence.

Today most of that can still be seen in Eastland's within estates such as Jericho and Shauri Moyo that were designed and built in the sixties to make urban living pleasurable complete with huge blocks of green space between houses and no fences so that neighbours can easily keep in touch.

Every-time I walk through Jericho and see houses with no fences and no steel doors it reminds me that physical security measures have nothing on neighbourliness.

For some strange reason the concept of walk-able spaces never caught on as we have gone out of our way to instead replicate our slums in concrete yet many of us grew up in areas where fences were an issue of legend.

So when I was planning where I wanted to own a house one thing that remained top of mind was that there should be no walls between the houses.

After a couple of years of living in Nairobi West we moved to Buru Buru which was supposed to be the place where the middle-class culture would be further nurtured and to provide a sense of aspiration to those living in the council estates to move up from renters to home owners.

The move did happen but not the mindset, those who had been used to being able to communicate with their neighbours while each sat outside their doors did not transition as soon after we moved into Buru Buru the walls started coming up.

It actually started with the replacement of greenery with concrete blocks from end to end, this was done by our parents to prevent their cars from getting dirty.

After the cement paving blocks then came the seven feet tall walls with broken glass atop the wall as a way to prevent our neighbours from climbing over when we ate chapatti, at least that is what I took away from that experience.

So now you can further appreciate why I did not want walling between the houses as I had never seen them when I visited my parents' rural area or when I walked around estates such as Jericho, there were also none of those walls you see today when we moved to Buru Buru but instead there were short picket fences.

As I was growing up all I saw around me was well planned estates designed with humans as social creatures in mind unlike what happened later as we started paddocking ourselves like prized bulls with high walls between neighbours and gates that would shame the designers of Fort Knox.

The walls now meant that one did not see their neighbours regularly and unlike a relationship absence seems to have made my parents' and their age mates less concerned about what their neighbours thought instead of them getting fonder as each now lived solidly within the bounds of the beacons of their urban plots.

While all this was unfolding it was we the children who suffered the most as when you needed to see a friend next door you had to contend with the wall, the gate, the broken glass as well as a tough house help recently shipped in from the village who followed the instructions from our parents like a military drill sergeant.

Slowly our friends were no longer those nearby as we had to go further afield to find clusters of children who were allowed to play outside something that really traumatised me as I am an extravert as well as being the fourth born I had absolute freedom unlike some of my neighbours who were my age mates but were the first borns and were thus monitored like chics.

When it all went to the dogs

As we came of age certain cultural issues started creeping into the urban areas with boys who had gone through initiation being required to move out from their mothers house thus started the construction of, initially, wooden shacks in backyards to accommodate the new men in the home.

What has never made sense is that even though there were a number of Africans in the teams that designed Buru Buru, all of whom and I can say without fear of contradiction grew up in rural villages yet not one thought of incorporating the need for a "thingira".

So as I was working with the designer of the house I planned to build we made sure to incorporate a guest wing that could morph based on the stage that the family was in, it could start off as a staff quarter, then a "thingira" as the boys come of age and then later a "granny flat" to accommodate an ageing parent.

When I look at the design today it could also have acted as a home office making it ideal for those isolating days of Covid and for working from home today.

?Soon the wooden shacks were replaced by stone structures that were called "extensions" and as the kids moved out they were rented out to supplement our retiring parents pensions. With time they went from a single self contained room to multi-storey structures.

As our parent's realised that retiring back to their villages was no longer a viable option even though they had built retirement homes the extensions got larger. I can remember the day someone demolished the original house and built a new multi-storey structure in the location as we are now seeing in South C, South B, Kilimani, Kileleshwa and Lavington.

All this was possible because when our parents' bribed to be allowed to put up walls around their houses, which was against the building code, they had for all intents and purposes turned the city moribund and after that it has been downhill.

When designing my home, I looked at how Runda prevented those who moved from Buru Buru after making money from turning the place into another concrete jungle. That is when I can across the sectional titles act as well as others that allowed for development approval to be removed from the council/county to an entity run and managed by the residents/owners.

So when working on the development I had a lawyer structure a way to make sure that any alterations outside the house would need approval by a majority consensus of the resident owners. Buru Buru really went to the dogs when the houses were no longer owner occupied but had tenants with the owners living elsewhere.

Dealing with the need for customisations

When I asked many of my colleagues who had build their homes what was the actual reason it turned out that it was mostly the need for a different internal floor plan more than anything else.

I remember one of them saying how they had spent millions to put in some fancy imported roofing material yet they do not remember ever spending a night on the roof.

So based on that feedback we worked with my architect to design multiple floor plan variations while keeping the outward appearance exactly identical.

Once we were done we had over 10 variations of the floor plans both for the ground floor and the first floor with them ranging from a 3 bedroom with an entire professional office, gym and bar to a 6 bedroom house all with the same external finish.

As I move into the Empty Nest Two of my life that flexibility now makes even more sense as the need to repurpose the spaces through the various stages we have gone through as a fa,ily now being clear.

While I was working on the concept I had met an Engineer who had build his house as a shell and then partitioned internally using gypsum which made a lot of sense to me as why exactly do we build our internal partition walls in 6 x 6 quarry stone instead of using a flexible materials?

When I met him he was making his 3rd floor plan alteration of the house in 20 years, he was enlarging the master bedroom to fit in a jacuzzi and a gym while the wife was enlarging the kitchen to be able to break away from the sitting room with her female friends when they visited.

The main reason I wanted to keep the exterior the same was that it would have allowed us to build the shells at once using a single contractor allowing for economies of scale then allowing the buyer to knock themselves out with the interiors which is really the only benefit of building your own house apart from selecting toilet tile colour schemes.

In addition, the flexibility would allow us to target a diverse range of buyers from retirees to multi-generational families with a live in grand parent.

Conclusion

Why didn't we build, I was not able to find enough people who shared my vision and so I opted to skip from location to location moving into houses that were in the right location so that our children could walk to school and now as they come of age and leave we have rightsized from a four bedroom with a servants quarter to a two bedroom flat located close to were I plan to spend most of my time once I "retire" or is it retyre?

In the process I met a number of like minded people who were not interested in building homes but together we put our skills and resources together to instead build a shopping mall meaning that the time spent developing the housing concept was not lost but instead repurposed.

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In addition, what the experience taught me was that we are denying ourselves the opportunity to live comfortably by accepting mediocre advise from land sellers and treating it like it was gospel truth.

I am at the tail end of my housing needs, hope that what I have shared will allow you to realise that you do not have to settle for less that what is best for you and your family.

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