THE GREAT ROMANCE

For most people, buying a house is as much a matter of chemistry as it is an investment. And when you find ‘the one’, it will capture your heart for years to come

Words by Lucia van der Post Illustration by Cecilia Carlstedt

HOUSES CAN BE made of many things. They might be bricks and mortar or stone and rubble. The Masai make their huts from cow dung, mud, sticks, grass, human urine and ash. In Borneo they use timber and lift their longhouses up on stilts; in Tonga they’re made of reeds and coconut leaves.

While wildly different materials go into their making, for most people on earth what really matters is having a place we can call home. And in the western world that mostly means a house. Such a simple five-letter word and yet it conjures up a world of meaning. As Vernon Baker, an African-American soldier decorated for heroism in the Second World War, put it so poignantly, it is about a place where “the heart can laugh without shyness. Home is where the heart’s tears can dry at their own pace.”

Choosing the place that feels right, that captures your heart, isn’t about rising prices and acquiring capital. It is a great romance, a leap of faith. Lindsay Cuthill, head of Savills Country Department, says, “Buying and selling houses is an undeniably emotional experience for most people – how could it not be? Buying a large country house, for example, in many ways defies logic. If you thought too long about the practicalities, it would quickly lose its romance, but for most people that’s not what drives the decision.”

Perhaps it is only those who, like me, never had a childhood family home who really understand how central to one’s sense of wellbeing it is. I grew up in a fractured family in South Africa, my mother and I living rather like nomads, traipsing from rented rooms to boarding houses with never a proper place to call home. When I married, thanks to a generous stepmother, we acquired our first family house in London’s Chelsea – those were the days when even impecunious young couples like us could afford such things. I still recall the charm of the Victorian terraces, the lovely windows of the first-floor drawing room, the little garden at the back.

It was where our children were born and where I had a full family life for the first time. The little Chelsea house gave us a place from which we could go out confidently to face the world. It was where we found tranquillity, warmth and laughter, where we began to share food and wine and stories with our friends.

I realised then that a house is so much more than four square walls. It is the repository of our memories, and it isn’t static. As we live and grow it becomes the storehouse of our family histories, a living archive of all that we are and have been. I only fully realised what the house had come to mean to us when, needing more space as our family grew, we blithely sold it. We were moving to a bigger, more beautiful house so I was utterly unprepared for the heartbreak we all felt when the day came to leave.

Our son, then just 11, wrote a poignant farewell letter to the old nursery, which he left pinned to the wall. So traumatic was the move for him, he vowed that when his time came to have children, he would never move house while they were small – and he never has. To this day, they live in the Islington terraced house they first fell in love with because its sweet Victorian rooms felt like home, the basement opened out onto a small garden and a little wood where owls hooted, and the cats chased the squirrels up the trees.

Cuthill agrees that the business of moving can be as painful as a lost love. “It can be a sort of grief. I spoke to someone this morning preparing to sell their family house after 25 years, and she feels overwhelmed by emotion while recognising it is the right thing to do. But for others, the decision to move and the search for the next house to fall in love with is exciting and energising.”

We never felt an attachment to our grand house in Wimbledon (though Joanna Lumley, who bought it later, wrote us the most charming letter about how much she loved it – in particular, the climbing roses we had planted), so we moved and bought a smaller place that was nothing like as impressive. Though it was horribly designed, we fell in love with its situation in a curious village-like corner of Kensington. We loved its glorious drawing room sporting Chinese yellow walls and the way it caught the morning and evening sun. It just felt like home. Gradually, around it, we have accumulated precious memories – both our sets of parents, now long gone, came to many a jolly dinner or Christmas here and it is the place from which our children went forth to make happy homes of their own. Our friends and acquaintances have sat at our dining table and shared their stories. Over time, we have turned it into a house we love deeply, and neither of us is ever moving.

So it is clear that where and what we choose as the framework of our lives matters deeply. We learn, too, that a house or home does not need to be grand. It’s making it your own that counts. Not just filling it with things that others think are fine, but with meaningful pieces: the rug we tracked down in a Turkish market, the jug we bought on a happy Cornish holiday, the picture somebody chose as a birthday present, the wonky chair we found in an antiques shop.

It’s the little things that often turn out to give one daily joy. The way the light falls in a particular place, the beautiful window on the landing, the charm of a cornice, the appeal of a high ceiling. We all know from experience that there is little that is rational about it. Often when we enter a house we know instantly if it is “the one”. Just as the lover is charmed by the beloved’s blue eyes or the curve of her neck, so it is with houses. We cannot say for sure what it is that makes us love them, but we certainly know it when we do.