Does your house speak to you?

Over the course of a couple of months, I had this tossed at me twice over. Friends telling me something is not quite right about the places they called “home”. One of them moved into a studio apartment, and shot out of it in a week’s time. “There was something off about it,” she said. “On the surface, there was nothing you could fault, very well-appointed, in fact… but there was this negative vibe about it, I can’t really explain…,” she threw up her hands.

I would have dismissed her as being overly imaginative, but a few weeks later, another friend moved out of a carefully-curated one-bedroom apartment: she had gone to great lengths to do it up, and had been, initially (the first couple of months that is), annoyingly ‘house-proud’. In her case, she had to pay a two-month penalty when she decided to move out — and it was a hit she wasn’t very happy with, but her apartment was clearly making her unhappier. Her next place — located in a way more inconvenient part of town — is ‘perfect’ she says, because she feels good each time she walks through its portals.

These two ‘incidents’ made me think. And I decided that houses — those spatial spaces that may take the form of a tiny apartment or a sprawling villa — blink out a message: you are welcome… or you are not.

A house probably talks to you more if you live alone. The ‘home’ company gets way more accentuated because it’s only you and the four walls. So, maybe, unwittingly, we cohabit with our homes, and they become friends.

In more conventional phases of our lives, we lived in ancestral properties. Or at least properties that came with an abiding sense of permanence. You grew into a house, instead of the other way around.

My family house — the one I grew up in — had personal history; I knew the people who had lived there earlier… or at least, I knew of them. I was already set, and had to make no effort.