Every practice says it stays involved on site. Most of them mean a monthly meeting with a clipboard. I mean something more awkward: I am there on the day the scaffold comes down, and I usually have a pointing trowel in my hand.
The joint is the drawing
A stone wall is mostly joint. On a coursed rubble wall the mortar can be a fifth of the face, and its colour, its depth and whether it is struck flush or brushed back decides how the wall reads from the road. I can draw the joint at 1:1, and I do, but a drawing is a promise and the trowel is where the promise gets kept.
So on every stone job there is a sample panel, built early, pointed three ways, and left to weather for a fortnight. The client, the mason and I stand in front of it in the rain and pick one. After that the mason owns it, and I am only there to admire it and to argue, gently, about the quoins.
Being useful rather than present
The trick is not to hover. A site visit that produces nothing but a list of snags is a wasted morning for everyone. The visits that matter are the ones where a decision is needed that day: a lintel that has arrived 40 mm short, a drain that has found a boulder, a window reveal that could be deeper now that the wall has gone up thicker than the engineer planned.
- I visit every fortnight, and more often in the first month and the last.
- I bring the drawings, the specification and a 5 m tape, and I leave the laptop in the car.
- Every decision is written on the drawing on site, photographed, and issued that evening.
The building you get is the sum of about four hundred small decisions made by people standing in mud. The drawings only get you to the mud.
The last joint
On the last day I ask the mason if I can point one joint. It is a ritual, not a skill; my pointing is adequate and theirs is beautiful. But it means I have touched the wall, and it means that when I bring the next client to see the house I can put my hand on the corner and say, honestly, that one is mine.