Alain de Botton about the perfect holiday house
In this essay, the writer and philosopher Alain de Botton explains in an entertaining and pointed way what sense a vacation home makes, especially when seen as something other than pure vacation accommodation.
The perfect holiday house promises a simultaneous taste of two of humans’ favourite pleasures: architecture and travel. And in seeking to discover what our ideal holiday house could be, we are also undertaking the important task of understanding a little better what is wrong with where we normally live.
We need to get away for the simple reason that houses exert a powerful influence on what we feel and in turn, on who we can be. The houses we usually live in, however delightful they are, will always be undermined by their stability and familiarity. On a bad day, they induce a kind of claustrophobia for which there is no effective cure other than to consult a travel agent about the ruinously-priced but irresistibly elegant concrete villa in the Ticino or the enticingly austere black shingle cabin in Iceland.
There are times when we need to surround ourselves with new furnishings and views to help cement inner transitions. Our senses go dead if we spend too long at home, we cease to notice rooms, smells and lights. But transported to a holiday house, we are suddenly as sensitive as if we had slipped out of our own skins. We remember the range of possibilities of organizing a kitchen. We marvel at what it would be like to have an entirely lemon-yellow crockery set. We realise the profound importance of where a house faces in the morning and what a difference it can make when someone has taken care to think carefully about the positioning of a still-life of a strawberry or the role of a vegetable garden.
Holiday houses are to architecture what affairs are to marriages: they can afford the luxury of being impractical, romantic and absurdly indulgent. We can enjoy for two weeks what would be unbearable if it were forever.
In choosing a house, we are allowed to give room to subsidiary sides of our characters that we have had to sacrifice in our day-to-day residence. We can give free reign to the part of us that covertly rather enjoys ornate 19th century Italian furniture or the smell of Bavarian pine pannelling. We can play at being the owner of a vicarage or a Zen apartment, a Zurich loft or a Sydney boat-house. The houses we rent can be freed of many tedious practical requirements of regular lodgings. They can afford to be irresponsible with space, allowing us only a single narrow cupboard, and yet to make way for indulgences like gigantic fireplaces or implausibly positioned windows and galleries. And whatever the charms of hotels, there are – as children know – particular pleasures in playing house for a time. It isn’t really until we have stocked up a fridge in a foreign country that we have begun to understand the place.
But the attraction of holiday houses isn’t limited to the period when we are living in them. Like all experiences of travel, they help us to return home more aware of the advantages of our own spaces and with a renewed commitment to the objects and choices we have made.
Text: Alain de Botton
Photo: Secular Retreat, © Jack Hobhouse
About the author
Alain de Botton was born in Switzerland in 1969 and studied history and philosophy in Cambridge. Now he lives in London with his family and works as an author, journalist and TV presenter. His books are concerned with philosophical ideas in relation to contemporary problems and with socio-political issues.
Some of the most well-known are: The Art of Travel and The Architecture of Happiness.
Alain has long been passionate about modern architecture. Aside from writing a book on the subject, Alain was instrumental in starting a new organisation called Living Architecture, which has asked a series of established and emerging world-class architects to build houses around the UK. The houses are available to rent for holidays by the general public.
This article first appeared in our book Urlaubsarchitektur 2 (out of print).
Read more about Living Architecture
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