Each house tells a story

Some time ago I wrote about the mid-century modern fibro beach cottage making the endangered list of buildings in our seaside suburbs. After I wrote this, it made me think about how each of our homes has a story behind it. They really become the backdrop for our lives (believe me, I know this, I’m married to a film director!).

I like to think that we don’t ever truly own our homes. Even if we’ve paid off the mortgage and built completely new, in the grand scheme of a building’s lifetime we are, at best, custodians of our man-made caves and plots of terra firma.

This might be a confronting concept for those who feel that home is our own, our inner sanctum. Yet this is illusory. Most of us don’t live alone and therefore we share our home stewardship with our partners, kids, pets, at times visitors, as well as the multitude of insects, the odd house mouse, possum and other biota that don’t recognise the boundary we attempt to create with Nature.

So if we give into the idea that our home is not completely ours, does that mean we should just give up on keeping house? I don’t think this will ever happen. The success of Bunnings and our DIY culture attests to our love of home making. We are the bowerbirds of the mammal world.

Renovation is like the busy stage teams behind the scenes at the theatre – one performance finishes only to be replaced by the next. Some stage artists are so good that they’ve made a living out of buying and renovating, so much so that home becomes a moving montage of sets.

This is a relatively new phenomenon. Once upon a time, we would stay in one place for much longer. I once worked with a lady who told me about her mum who lived in country NSW. She had never left her own region, not even to visit Sydney. Her biggest trip was to travel into the local big town to go to the post office!

According to CoreLogic, in Australia, the average house is owned on average for 10.5 years, whilst in the US people on average move 11.5 times over a lifetime. So what does it mean for our homes with this flux of old and new owners?

Well, this takes me back to the stage-like nature that our rooms take on. The private intimacy of bedrooms, the camaraderie of the living rooms,
the nourishing utility of the kitchen, the cleansing functionality of the bathroom – they are the backdrops to our daily rituals.

They affect the way we face our world and in turn we affect them.

The scratchings of children’s height marks on a door frame, the hole in the wall caused by an angry tantrum, the historical layers of paint or wallpaper fashions behind the kitchen cupboards. It is in our homes we seek to curate our lives, but it is not the end of the journey.

Many houses will have multiple kitchen and bathroom facelifts, extra bedrooms added for expanding families, attic lofts, basement dens, and many will be scratched off the earth to form the particleboard of a new home’s flooring.

If then, we re-calibrate our idea of home to one of stewardship, I believe this is a more conversational approach to our relationship with the buildings around us. We can give the building a character of its own, like any other member of the household.

You may want to ask the question next time you go to renovate, “Hey house, I need to enliven my relationship with you, what do you need to help me make this happen?”

One of the world’s most celebrated architects, Louis Kahn, would talk to building materials like this. His famous conversation to a brick goes something like this: “‘What do you want, brick?’ And brick says, ‘I like an arch.’ And you say to brick, ‘Look, I want one, too, but arches are expensive and I can use a concrete lintel.’ And then you say: ‘What do you think of that, brick?’

Brick says: ‘I like an arch.’”