Enigma, a house with a good sense of irony

The other day I went to see a new house for sale and was positively surprised to find myself in front of a structure which was decisively different from the usual buildings at present on the market. I had been told beforehand that the house had been built in the 70s and that it was very big and had therefore formed an image in my mind of the typical kind of 70s building – which isn't very easy to sell. Without much ardor I had gone to meet the owners.

The house, however, really took me by surprise: a geometric complex of joined shapes, a bit like a big white box with enormous triangular and rectangular windows running up the entire (three floored) façade of the house, terraces sticking out and pleasant irregular niches.

The inside of the building was a luminous wonder too with its big glass open space and cat walk almost floating in mid air leading to the bedrooms.

All of this reminded me of how important the dwellings we live in are, not only because they are “a roof over our heads” but because they are inextricably and intrinsically part of us. Houses are projections of our internal spaces, they reflect our hopes and our fears – there are rooms full of odds and ends like the thousands of thoughts in our minds, bright spacious rooms projecting a future full of sunshine; antique rooms for those who can't let go, minimalistic rooms for ambitious open minded go-aheads...

Big windows in houses are like eyes wide open and full of curiosity; windows with shutters half closed are like timid children spying behind a door.

Every house has a distinct personality in every way: traditionalists with their terra-cotta floors; entrepreneurs with parquet; sterile and bare rooms for the apprehensive and distrustful, strong coloured walls for the bold...

What a privilege to be able to observe such intimate places- which at times move me and at others disturb me!

It's almost as though you can, even if just very briefly, look into people's souls... well no, actually, it's rather more like looking into the souls of the houses themselves – through their inhabitants – a special kind of tuning in.

Happy houses, sad houses, tired houses and houses full of enthusiasm. There are houses that embrace you as soon as you open their gates and those that are so full of melancholy that it seems they want to keep you away. It is for the latter kind of estate for which I feel need more commitment and more passion: it is for them that I need to find those special devoted and caring owners: people who will give loving energy back to those walls which have gone through so much!

Back to my original house of this week... let me say that it is a house with a sense of humour, that it has an ironic luminosity and a mordacious intelligence – it is, however, a little aloof too and desperately needs a bit of stimulating intellect before it dies of boredom.

Anyone out there willing to do the honours?

Share

Share this page

on your social networks