Tim Ross

I expect more actually from John because he's a man who... Critique time.

John, I expect more.

He's a man who celebrates and loves craft, who loves the tactile and loves the analogue, who is in love with craftsmanship and has an amazing relationship with probably hundreds of makers.

And so his own personal taste in architecture is extremely traditional, actually.

He's interested in tactility, texture, materiality, and using very, very simple materials that tell you where they're from, like broken bits of clay and...

Glass, wood, brass, and arranged always beautifully and considered.

And, yeah, Ariel was having to find an app on his phone that he couldn't buy.

You're trying to charge your phone while you're sitting in a deck chair.

He's not interested.

He's not interested.

Not interested.

Not interested.

Because he fulfilled every objective of his own with this house, and that wasn't one of them.

Yeah.

I mean, there's one big idea that's not in the lab, but in the surface of the building, in the principal material, which is brick.

And it's a really interesting idea that anybody who goes and visits a craftsperson in their workshop...

wonders about which is what happens to all the crap all the stuff that doesn't work that comes out the back that goes in the bin and john sort of asked a simple question is what happens if you take a brick that's got holes punched through it like an engineering brick you know and you rip it into two then you've got one side is clean and fair-faced and the other side is this mess of protruding bits of torn clay and that's what he's built his house out of

thousands of those and it's like a sort of it's like looking at a kind of 1970s handmade hand knitted poncho you know it's true I'm not sure how I feel about that description of it and then the glazing process that he went through to

Yes, and that comes out of collecting things, doesn't it?

He describes how he was in Agrigento once, and he was watching a guy plough a field.