Draft:John Brooke Fieldhouse

John Brooke Fieldhouse

John Richard Brooke Fieldhouse (1950–) is a British interior designer, architectural writer and fiction and non-fiction writer, who has won several awards for both interior design and short fiction writing.

Family background and early life

John Fieldhouse was born in 1950 in Scarborough, North Yorkshire, United Kingdom to art schoolteacher parents Raymond Fieldhouse and Frances Margaret Fieldhouse (née Ingham) who, particularly Fieldhouse’s mother, had an inspirational influence on his attitude to art and choice of career. Fieldhouse trained at the Royal College of Art in London between 1973 and 1976. He was awarded a Diploma membership of the Chartered Society of Designers (CSD) in 1984 and elected a Fellow (FCSD) in 1989.

Education

Fieldhouse attended Newby Primary School between 1955 and 1961, followed by Bootham School in York, an independent secondary [[boarding school] administered by the Society of Friends (Quakers), from 1961 until 1968, before going on to take an Art Foundation Course at Scarborough School of Art (now Scarborough TEC) from 1969 to 1970. Fieldhouse then spent three years at the Art & Design Faculty of the Manchester Polytechnic (now part of the Manchester Metropolitan University) between 1970 and 1973, achieving a first class honours degree, before studying at the Royal College of Art in London from 1973 to 1976, where he obtained a Master’s degree in Architecture (MA RCA).

Professional experience

Following graduation, Fieldhouse worked for a number of companies between 1977 and 1988, including architects Sheperd Fowler & Robinson in Sheffield, architects John Gaytten Associates in Oldham, Greater Manchester, commercial interior designers BDG McColl [4], then located in Marylebone, London, and bespoke interior designers Peter Glynn Smith Associates in Islington, London, gaining experience in the design of pubs, clubs, hotels, restaurants, airport facilities, shops, offices, and increasing his professional responsibility from Assistant Designer up to Office Manager.

In 1988, he was head-hunted by Pennington Robson for the post of Associate Director and Office Manager in Southwark, where he stayed until 1990. He left in 1990 to form his own company .

From 1995, Fieldhouse was Visiting Tutor in Interior Design at Chelsea College of Arts (now part of the University of the Arts London), where he wrote, established and ran the Modular Course in Interior Design and also lectured on the Intermediate Course on Professional Practice until 2005. During that time he supplied two case histories for fellow lecturer Tomris Tangaz’s book Interior Design Course: Principles, Practices and Techniques for the Aspiring Designer (2006) (revised edition 2018), later quoted as a “bible for those hoping to get on the career ladder” .

Principal, Brooke Fieldhouse Associates (1990–2012)

Fieldhouse established his own design practice in September 1990, Brooke Fieldhouse Associates, operating mainly in London, but later in both York and London, eventually becoming Owner and Sole Proprietor. During that time, he undertook projects involving improvements to work environments using artificial lighting, daylighting, temperature control, colour, desking layouts and acoustic improvements. Fieldhouse, in campaigning – with others – for status as ‘interior architects’, told the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) Newsdesk, “future EU safety standards such as desk heights, lighting levels will force the issue…” Notable clients included, among others, the then BAA plc Gatwick Airport, Coca-Cola, as well as various government training and enterprise councils (TECs). In 1995, Fieldhouse began to take on residential jobs, including a number of Grade II and Grade II* listed buildings, such as the entire remodelling of a five-storey private house in Eaton Terrace, Belgravia, London. In 2000, Fieldhouse supplied project management and detailed design drawing skills to Callender Howorth for the remodelling of a private house called Charlecote, Hampstead Hill Gardens, North London. The house, when originally built for the celebrated Victorian watercolourist and illustrator Charles Green (painter), was featured in the 1877 edition of The Building News and Engineering Journal (now Building (magazine)) .

Working style

Usually working on ‘interventions’ as opposed to ‘new build’, Fieldhouse garnered a reputation for working with what he was given rather than ripping out and starting again. His work is often characterised by the use of strong colour, concealed lighting, unusual textures, reflective finishes and harmonising the old with the new. Over time, he developed an aversion to Channel 4’s Grand Designs-inspired obsession with open plan and ‘wow’ space. Eventually, he rejected the use of what became the formulaic practice of introducing bifold doors in the traditional Victorian terraced house (which had traditionally been designed as a series of cellular spaces), and found himself at odds with the concept that the English garden could become part of the living area – and vice versa. He began to react against the ‘minimalist’ interior and against architects’ disparaging of the display of client’s “tasteless knick-knacks”. One of his most cherished moments was when a client asked him to design a space to accommodate a ‘non-fitted kitchen’.

During the first decade of the 21st century, Fieldhouse noted the emergence of a new kind of client for small-scale residential work, who, again influenced by Grand Designs, preferred to do their own project management, provide their own contractor and assemble their own design scheme, using the designer for obtaining permissions and dealing with statutory requirements only. Fieldhouse, also around this time, noted serious failings in the design of retirement apartments, particularly in the areas of lighting, heating systems and the provision of storage space. He told The Yorkshire Post in 2017, “… housing providers assume that leaseholders or tenants will have downsized their possessions so radically as to arrive on the doorstep with no more than two suitcases."

Fieldhouse states that his greatest influencers in the field of interior design were Marcel Breuer and Luis Barragán.

Writing career (2009–)

Fiction writing

In 2010, Fieldhouse made a significant departure in his professional career by moving to York, deciding that his company was not financially viable and later winding up his interior design practice in 2012, and, encouraged by a modest prize win for a short story entry (Writing Magazine, Warners Group Publications), took up creative writing full time, aged 62. Fieldhouse saw writing as an opportunity to develop his intuition, something which, during his interior design career, he had suppressed in favour of the technical aspects of his work. These events also closely followed the death of his widowed mother in 2008. Fieldhouse has stated that, when writing fiction, he generally likes to use the name Brooke as if it were a first name (i.e. writing as Brooke Fieldhouse), to offer a degree of gender anonymity to the reader and anonymity to the author.

His main literary influences have come from Iris Murdoch, Angela Carter, Muriel Spark, Shirley Jackson and Barbara Comyns. Fieldhouse has co-edited The Friargate Anthology with Janet Dean and published by Quacks Books Ltd in 2016 as a charity project.

Non-fiction writing

As an interior design writer, Fieldhouse wrote and self-published Architecture York: Twentieth Century Plus (Matador (imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd), 2022). The book was researched over a period of nine years, describes modern public and private buildings and structures in York up to 2021, and has been described as an “important contribution” by York C20, an architectural gazetteer and website of 20th century York produced by the University of York art history students in October 2022. In making the point about how some UK cities, especially historic ones, have failed to develop to meet the demands of the 21st century, Fieldhouse told The Yorkshire Post in 2022, “cities don’t stay still, they either develop or regress, that’s it; preserving in aspic isn’t on the menu.”

Fieldhouse attended numerous courses, workshops and seminars on writing, including at the Arvon Foundation, where he was a residential student at Ted Hughes’s house in Heptonstall, West Yorkshire in 2013. He also attended The Writers Workshop and Faber Academy events at the University of York in 2014, Awakening the Writer Within at the Madhyamaka Kadampa Meditation Centre in Pocklington, East Riding of Yorkshire in 2015, the York Literature Festival intermittently since 2013, where he read work from The Friargate Anthology in 2016. He has participated in a community writing project, Write-a-Wish, working with care home residents and care assistants, as well as several writers’ workshops and the Scribe Project with The Hut York.

Fieldhouse has also written more than 85 book reviews, posted on Amazon.com. He is a member of the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society and The Society of Authors.

List of literary works

Novels

• The Gilded Ones (Troubador Publishing Ltd, Market Harborough, 2018) (ISBN 978-1-78901-399-3)
• Escape from the Temple (Troubador, Market Harborough, 2023) (ISBN 978-1-80514-023-8)

Short stories

• The Gift (prizewinner, Writing Magazine, Warners Group Publications, February 2013)
• The Landlords (Fiction on the Web, August 2014)
• After the Bombardment (Fiction on the Web, 2014); republished in The Best of Fiction on the Web, 2018
• The Russian Doll (Scribble Magazine, December 2014) [34]
• The Good Life (Fiction on the Web, 2014) [35]
• The Art of Ownership (Fiction on the Web, 2015) [36]
• The Enchanter (in, The Friargate Anthology, Radius Publishing, 2015) [37]
• The Bonfire of the Vanities (in, The Friargate Anthology, Radius Publishing, 2015) [18]
• Collage (prizewinner, Scribble Magazine, Winter 2015) [38]
• Drowning by Numbers (Fiction on the Web, 2016) [39]
  
• Open House (Fiction on the Web, 2016) [40]
• The Magic Carpet (Fiction on the Web, 2017) [41]
• Raw Concrete (Fiction on the Web, 2017) [42]
• Crossing Over (Fiction on the Web, 2018) [43]
• The Hidden Apartment and Other Stories (Troubador, Market Harborough, 2020), hardback short story collection with colour photo images by Gareth Buddo (Furmoto, 2020) [44]

Non-fiction (architecture and interior design)

• Architecture York: Twentieth Century Plus (paperback pocket book) (Matador, 2022) [45]