Whose house is it anyway?

Frank Lloyd Wright is said to have broken into a house he'd designed to rearrange the furniture; Mies van der Rohe fought with a client who wanted a wardrobe. Emma Cullinan on what happens when an architect-designed house becomes a home.

If someone commissions an architect to build a snappy new home you would assume that they will take an aesthetic-minded approach all the way through to the interior. So it can be surprising to find beautifully detailed, carefully crafted homes filled with cheap pine furniture and some forebear's brown Dralon sofa hurriedly hidden beneath a crumpled white cloth.

Well, it's understandable. The money dwindles and the nerves are shot, what with all the building work, so smart furnishings are put on the 'distant dream' list.

And really, who cares what the house looks like? Once a home has been built it's handed over to the owners and they can do what they wish with it - although it can pain architects to see their carefully considered project adorned with cheap frills.

Perhaps they should be happy that's it's just the interiors that have been tackily dealt with, some have to suffer exterior additions too.

In one Dublin local authority scheme, a resident has stuck plastic classical columns, PVC coach lamps and plaster of Paris eagles onto a clean, award-winning house. The carefully detailed, high-performance timber-frame windows have also been jettisoned in favour of cottage- style PVC frames. Anyone tempted to go down this route should remember that they will need planning permission.

Such additions to buildings, which have nothing to do with the inherent structure, are known by designers and builders as "gob-ons" giving some indication as to just how welcome they are. But many people will cling onto tradition, not ready to make the leap into a new style. In the above case the building's resident didn't have a direct relationship with the architect, but even where the user and architect have a working relationship it pays for both to share the same sense of style. People are rather complicated beings and one person's idea of a stylish house will be another's pastiche Portuguese palace.

Once a well-designed home is built it does need some respect: a Modernist white box somehow doesn't work with an ostentatious tropical-themed Changing Rooms-style interior while a timber-clad and extensive glass façade doesn't take kindly to heavy floral curtains and a television and bookshelf backed up against the glass. By the same token a beautiful period farmhouse doesn't take well to lashings of cement and PVC that are out of sympathy with its comfortable character.

Architects differ too: some houses that are described as "architect designed" could have been created by a bored teenager, so careless is the creation, while other architects vet their clients carefully to make sure that they won't be wasting their time in arguments about PVC windows, mock Georgian façades or a deluge of dormer openings in the roof.

Clients too must be aware of their architect's style because you need to be able to trust that they'll design the house you want.

One Dublin client who gave her architect free rein has been presented with a clean light-filled structure which she professes to like but has been a tad slow to move into from her relative's standard 1930s home next door. The architect is thrilled to have been given the opportunity to design something so innovative but he does say that every such structure is not just a building but a new way of life for the client. And this client needs to do some mental adjusting.

Another Dublin architect who did a scheme for a property developer found it difficult to stomach the showhome. His clean timber and glass-heavy structure was plushed up with swaggy curtains, velvet cream, brown and black bed coverings and pile-plentiful beige carpets.

Some architects over history have managed to persuade their clients to let them do everything. These include Frank Lloyd Wright who designed furniture for his homes and was said to run spot checks on clients, after they'd moved in, to see whether they'd kept everything in the right place. There's even one story that he broke into one house he'd designed and rearranged the furniture.

Charles Rennie Mackintosh certainly had to compromise with his client on a house he did in Northampton, England, for the model railway maker Wenman Bassett-Lowke and his wife Florence Jane. He created a dark, latticed lounge that spoke of a new direction the architect might have gone in had this not been his last project. Yet once he'd left, the clients toned down the black paint to grey and Florence Jane insisted on a traditional Edwardian diningroom and bedroom which lay in stark contrast to Mackintosh's style elsewhere in the house, which included a dramatic black and white striped guest bedroom. Recent restoration work, overseen by architects John McAlsan and Partners (who also restored the De La Warr Pavilion by Eric Mendelsohn and Serge Chermayoff in Bexhill-on-Sea), has blackened the room to its former 'glory'.

While Mies van der Rohe's 1951 Farnsworth house in Illinois, US, has gone down in architectural history as an icon of its age - and beyond - he somewhat imposed the design on his client Dr Edith Farnsworth.

She stopped the funds when the costs rose beyond $70,000 and sued the architect. She complained that the glass house - a prime example of the International style - was difficult to live in as it drew droves of camera-clicking tourists, while its large glass-clad void cost a lot to heat (glass's insulating properties have improved since then). The space seemed to attract lots of bugs and there was a wrangle over the promise to have custom-built furniture. Farnsworth insisted on a wardrobe, despite Mies telling her to hang her clothes on the back of the bathroom door, as it was only a weekend retreat and she shouldn't have too much luggage.

Complaining that she'd wanted something meaningful but had instead got 'glib, false sophistication', Farnsworth sued the architect and he countersued - and won.

She moved in and decorated it her own way. It was later bought by property developer Peter Palumbo, who respected its history, and now it's in the hands of a trust which has restored it in line with Mies' vision.

So at Farnsworth it seems that maybe it wasn't so much a case of form following function - one of Mies' maxims - but of function having to fit into the form. And it calls into question what successful architecture is: is it to create a work of art or a place that suits its inhabitants? A house or a home if you like. The answer is that it should be both.

John and Maura Ward, from Derry, got to know their architects Mary Kerrigan and Frank Harkin a good few years before they commissioned a house from them.

Following long chats with Mary they were happy that she was a creative thinker who listened to her clients.

They gave free rein to their architects, right down to the interiors and furniture, and they are thrilled with their light-filled house in a subtle style that nods to the vernacular, and contains contemporary furniture that includes an Orange Slice chair by Pierre Paulin. Architects can create masterpieces or, at least, will give the client what they want and many will hope that their clients respect the work.

As architect Paul Quilligan points out, if someone gave you a painting by a renowned artist you wouldn't get your own paintbrush out and touch it up here and there to "improve" it in line with your own taste.