The Kingswood Sarcophagus – An experiment in long term re-purposing

When the ‘red car’ rolled off the showroom floor in 1977, Katona Snr felt the kind of humility that owning a state-of-the-art machine makes you feel. The family will be safe, and always arrive on time. Roughly 30 years later, Katona Jnr felt that same kind of humility the morning of his wedding day, frantically reassembling the interior and touching up the paint ready for the last drive it’d take for almost 15 years.

I had dreams of getting the old beauty back up and running, and teaching the kids a thing or two about it in the process. One day recently I got underneath and spend the afternoon cracking rusty nuts and cheese-grating my knuckles. I hated it – the joy of spinning spanners has gone.

The kids are too young to get in to it for years yet, and I want a permanent workshop space to leave projects out with space enough to store ladders and straight edges within easy access instead of under the house.

There’s room for a small timber stack and the boot is still accessible through a hatch door.

Most importantly the old beauty can sleep peacefully protected from falling bikes and wayward prams. And rather than the car collecting a roof full of junk as if it was a shelf – now it is a shelf.

One day one of the little ones will show an interest in blowing the dust off Grandpa’s old spanners and we’ll have a lot of fun uncovering and re-assembling, and once again we’ll have a drive. Until then, sweet dreams.