Living with strange bedfellows

Hamish Lewis introduces you to his uninvited housemates.

My house, I suspect, is much like yours, in that it’s alive. It’s not merely that things go bump in the night, but more to do with the cockroaches that scatter as the kitchen light flickers on. The spores from the bathroom wall that multiply in my throat, or the missing window pane in the laundry where the weather leaks in. The sagging floors upstairs, like the place pulled on an old hat, frowning at the brim.

I am a share house resident, and I am one of the lucky ones. I took on the undulating masses in queues that stretch round the block and managed to escape with both my life and a lease. I tamed the real-estate agents like a veritable snake charmer, only to fear every time the property manager emails.

It is surely the case that nobody should have to live like this, in a house that labours to fulfill the promise of shelter, beneath the spectre of being priced out of one’s own existence. But many of us do. In fact, “the problem of the house” is hardly new. In his 1927 work Towards a New Architecture, Le Corbusier suggests that you and I are to be “pitied for living in unworthy houses since they ruin our health and our morale.”

To him, the solution to the malaise of the modern city involves considering the home as “a machine for living.” A machine which, in place of cogs and gears, has an adequate space to sleep, to eat, to think and to sit, identical for all and infinitely replicable with the aid of industry. The role of such a house is to provide us with some comfort to keep us sane and productive members of capitalist society. I am doubtful that this amounts to an improvement in the lives of the inhabitants of the home. It seems that if the wary, old houses