Edwin, Alfred and the need to reconnect with emotions again

We were 100% happy with our house.

It took 7 years of investment, sweat, heated debate and injuries to convert a neglected Edwardian Semi into a place we loved.

It felt like home. It was designed around the way we live and work, and was our perfect mix of period, modern and eco-friendly.

Concrete floors (see 50 shades of Grey and how specificity affects results), period tiled hallway, sanded floors, stripped pine doors, restored fireplace, walled garden, new kitchen and driveway, 2 new bathrooms. solar panels and battery, new roof - we’d done a lot.

Then, I did something stupid.

While Sophie was away in Cornwall with her family I decided to view a house that was on the market.

I was scratching an itch.

I hadn’t told Sophie. But when she returned I came clean and asked if she wanted to view it. I was already in love at this point.  Sophie was as reluctant as I was besotted.

So, with some gentle arm twisting (which may have involved a McPlant meal at McDonalds) I booked us a second viewing.

I think it took 13 minutes of the walk around your for Sophie to say “I really want to live here.”

The house was built in 1864 and designed by Alfred Waterhouse - probably the most renowned architect of the Victorian era.  He designed the Natural History Museum, Manchester Town Hall, Strangeways Prison, Pridential Insurance Head Office and hundreds of other buildings.

Waterhouse designed the house for William Long - his friend and a young industrialist who ran a coupe of tanneries in my hometown.  William Long was a philanthropist and man of his time - investing energies into science, education and horticulture. His diaries are available in my local library.

As you can probably guess, I’ve gone down a deep household genealogy rabbit hole.  Early Saturday mornings in the local museum archives, forensic googling, and chatting to anyone I can link back to the house’s history. I know who lived there over the last 160 years, what they did and who they employed. I already know some of their back-stories and plan to explore others.

Bizarrely, William Long's wife lived in a Victorian workhouse that is now the building right next door to Resulting's office. Spooky.

Alfred Waterhouse, a Quaker, was the brother of Edwin Waterhouse, one of the founders of Price Waterhouse - now PwC, and one of my pivotal employers.

The house is Grade 2 listed and Gothic styled like many of Waterhouse’s buildings, but on a smaller, residential scale.

Weirdly, because the house is so secluded, there are very few photographs documenting its 160 year history.  In all, I’ve found 4 pre 1990s photos including 2 grainy aerial photographs. We've also found a photograph in an 1898 German gardening newspaper of a huge plant growing in the 'hothouse' which is now a dilapidated conservatory, including a German interview with the Gardener.

It was commandeered as a convalescent hospital during WW1 - and has a tiled storage room that we believe was an antiseptic store. Fittingly, this will be my walk in drinks cabinet.

When we were waiting to move in, I couldn't drive within a mile of the house without going to look at it.  I just sat in the car staring at it.

It has an allure.

An energy.

It’s brutally beautiful.

It’s also a project.  A money pit.  And, a potentially decade devouring decision.

But we don’t feel like we’re buying the house.  Instead, we feel like we’re slotting in to a line of custodians who have lived in, and maintained it over 16 decades.

It’s a weird feeling.  Kind of humbling and scary.

A few weeks back, I managed to get my hands on a rare book - there only seem to be 2-3 available online. Alfred Waterhouse, 1830-1905: Biography of a Practice is the complete history of Waterhouse’s design and profession in building his architects practice.  Our house is listed but not photographed - as commission number 166 for the architects fee of £3,000 (now £46,000).

So, a wealthy Victorian industrialist forked out the equivalent of £50k to have an architect envision, design and plan his family home.

Imagine that today.

But forget housing for a moment and imagine commissioning a modern day Architect - an Enterprise or Technical Architect - the modern day top-of-the-pile technology job title.

Companies pay these guys much more to envision, design and plan IT systems that run business. For £50k, you'd be lucky to get an Enterprise Architect for 2 months to work on some Serverless, JSON, composable, API, Kubernetes babble.

Have you ever heard of a modern day IT architect design something that has allure? Design something that people just sit and stare at? Design something that makes people feel insignificant and part of its history?

Which of today’s IT architects will have books chronicling their life in practice, documenting their design principles and listing their work inventory? Will we be scouring the internet or library archives for their designs 160 years from now?

Name an IT architect who has produced a design so emotive that the ‘owners’ fell in love with it within minutes of their first interaction.

Modern business side IT architects use Visio and wear Jesus sandals.

Software vendor architects hide behind product managers and marketing departments. With the exception of Jony Ive at Apple, I can't name a famous 'architect' of technology in the past 20 years.

Tim Berners-Lee? He created the Internet and will most likely be credited with ruining society 160 years from now. Assuming humans still exist to note the credits by then.

The art of crafting alluring designs got lost somewhere between 1864 and 2023.

Recently, I've done a couple of small keynote talks entitled "Filling the holes in your S/4 Business Case". Although unorthodox, I don't use slides. Instead I use a bag of tools and a vegetable as props.

I won't ruin it here as I plan to do the same talk in the UK and USA during 2024 with various partners and as part of Resulting's own events. But what I will say is that the reconnection of technology solutions and human emotions is a key takeaway of that talk and this ramble.

If you remember one thing as an architect is that you are responsible for the emotional state of the people who interact with the things you design

Epilogue

By the way, if you're an SAP Architect looking for a change in 2024 and if you fancy working for the UK's best loved SAP consultancy - working business-side and helping huge businesses craft solutions they love, then drop me a note.

We probably don't pay packages as high as PwC or EY (although I hear they're both laying people off right now). We also definitely don't have the same structured career development pathways as big consulting firms.

But I do have share options to offer to brilliant people. And, we have a zero dickhead hiring policy.

Seriously, if you're a brilliant SAP Finance, Supply Chain, HCM, OTC, Procurement or Technical Architect, DM me.

I'm also open to talking to people who, like Alfred Waterhouse, need to cut their teeth on smaller projects before moving on the the big stuff.

I'm off to hire a floor sander for Boxing Day.