An Incomplete History of the Houses I Have Loved

I have lived in eleven houses. This seems like a lot until you consider that I am forty-four, and that several of these were very short stays, and that two of them were shared in configurations that most people would classify as barely qualifying. But eleven houses, and I have loved, in varying degrees and for different reasons, at least eight of them, which is a better percentage than I have managed with most other things.

I want to try to describe them. Not all eleven — some were temporary enough that they failed to make a lasting impression, like minor characters who drift through a novel without acquiring dimension. But the ones that mattered. The ones that I still think about, that I find myself returning to in memory on certain kinds of afternoons.

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The first one I loved was not the first I lived in. It was a cottage in a village I moved to for a year when I was twenty-six, following a job that didn't last and a person who lasted even less. The cottage was small enough to feel deliberate — a front room, a kitchen, two rooms upstairs, a garden that was mostly nettle but contained, in one corner, an ancient apple tree that produced a small quantity of apples in October, hard and slightly sour, perfect.

The cottage was cold in winter. The windows didn't fit well, and the heating was a system of radiators that had been installed optimistically in the 1970s and had been declining ever since. I wore two jumpers inside from November to March. I slept under three blankets. In the mornings the windows had condensation on the inside, and I would write in it with my finger, little notes to no one, which would dry by midday and be gone by evening.

I have often thought about why I loved it so much, given that it was cold and damp and isolated and the job had failed and the relationship had failed and there was, objectively, very little to recommend the situation. What I have come to think is that the house itself was a kind of company. It was present in the way that small, old things are present — with a quality of having been through things, of having absorbed a long history of occupation, of knowing something about duration. I was twenty-six and badly oriented, and the house was, relative to me, very old and quite settled, and I found this genuinely comforting.

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The second house I want to describe was in a city, a flat on the fourth floor of a building that had been, at some point, a textile factory, though very little evidence of this remained except the height of the ceilings and the weight of the iron window frames. The flat was rented from a woman named Mrs Harari who lived in the flat below and who had strong views about noise after ten o'clock and an apparently inexhaustible capacity for patience with tenants.

I loved this flat for different reasons than the cottage. The cottage I had loved for its oldness, its settledness, its quality of having survived. The factory flat I loved for its light. It faced south and the windows were large and the light that came through them in the afternoon was a specific shade of gold that I have not seen reproduced exactly anywhere else. It was, somehow, the colour of a mood I couldn't name — not happiness, exactly, but adjacent to it. Attentive. Present. The room seemed more real in that light.

I stayed three years. When I left I took nothing of the flat with me except the memory of the light, and I have been trying, with varying success, to find it again in every place I have lived since.

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The third house on this list is one I don't entirely understand my feelings about, even now. It was a house I shared with four other people in my late twenties, a tall terraced house in a part of the city that was then less fashionable and is now considerably more so. The house was impractical in most ways: one bathroom for five people, a kitchen designed for two, a living room in which you could not seat all five residents simultaneously without someone sitting on something that was not technically a seat.

But the house had a quality I have not found in any house I have lived in alone. It was inhabited. At any hour there was a chance of encountering another person, of having a conversation, of being drawn into whatever was happening that day. The house held a social life that was not planned but simply happened as a consequence of proximity. You ate together sometimes. You sat in the kitchen at one in the morning sometimes, drinking tea and talking about things you hadn't known were bothering you until someone asked.

I left because the arrangement came to a natural end, as shared houses do — people dispersed, the lease expired. But I have missed it. I have missed the specific ease of a shared life, the way it held the social instinct without requiring you to arrange it. Alone, you must make an effort. In the shared house, you simply had to be present.

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There is a house I have not yet mentioned that is probably the one I loved most. I am saving it because I am not sure I can describe it adequately, and also because writing about it requires a quality of attention that I have to work up to.

It was a house in a city in another country, rented for six months while I was on a fellowship that I had applied for without expecting to get. The house belonged to a family who were elsewhere for a year, and they had left it largely as it was: books on the shelves, pictures on the walls, a particular tea service in the kitchen that I used every morning and which had a weight and balance that made the act of making tea feel like a ceremony.

I don't speak the language of that country fluently. I was, for most of those six months, at a slight remove from everything — understanding enough to navigate but not enough to fully inhabit. And the house was, in this context, the only place where I felt I knew the rules. I had learned its light and its sounds — the particular creak of the third step, the way the kitchen window rattled in the east wind, the cycle of the old boiler. I had learned its rhythms. And in learning them I had made it, temporarily and incompletely but genuinely, mine.

On the last morning, before the cab came, I walked through each room once. I didn't touch anything. I just wanted to be in each of them one more time, to register them, to say something that I couldn't put into words. This is, I understand, a very ordinary thing to do. But the feeling was not ordinary. The feeling was of leaving a place that had been good to me, that had held me well in a period when I needed holding, that had asked nothing of me except attention, and which I was giving back, at the end, more or less as I found it.

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What do I make of this, the long pattern of houses and what I have felt in them?

I think we underestimate how much of our inner life is held by the spaces we inhabit. Not in a mystical sense — not the idea that houses absorb our spirits or carry our histories in their walls, though I understand the appeal of that idea. But in a simpler, more material sense: that the light in a room shapes how we see, that the sounds of a house shape how we think, that the quality of a space in which we read and eat and sleep and work has a pervasive and underacknowledged effect on who we are while we're in it.

The houses I have loved have all shared something, I think. They were distinct. They had a particularity — a quality that made them themselves rather than generically habitable. The light was specific, or the sounds were specific, or the space had a logic that I came to understand and find beautiful. They were not interchangeable.

I have lived in houses that were interchangeable. Clean, adequately sized, functional, indistinguishable from any other adequately sized functional accommodation of their type. I did not love them. I survived in them, which is a different thing.

We talk sometimes about finding a home, as if home were a place to be discovered rather than made. But the houses I have loved were not found — they were understood, slowly, over weeks and months of daily attention. They became home the way any relationship becomes real: through accumulation, through the willingness to pay attention, through the patient work of learning something well enough to love it.

I am living now in the eighth house. It is not the best one. The light is good but not as good as the factory flat. The garden is not the apple tree. The staircase has no creak I have learned to love.

But it is mine in the way that matters — in the way of having been lived in, of carrying the sediment of ordinary days. And I am still learning it, which means it still has things to give.

I will probably love it, in time.---

There is a house I have not visited since I lived there, and I have been thinking, as I write this, about whether to go back.

The impulse to revisit places is one I understand but have generally resisted. The logic of the return visit is this: you will see the place again; you will have the experience of recognition; you will take the past and the present and hold them together in your hands simultaneously, and this will tell you something about time and change and the person you have become.

But in my experience it rarely works that way. What you find, usually, is not the past held together with the present but the past replaced by the present — the new tenants, the repainted walls, the shop that has replaced the café where something important happened. The visit does not recover the past. It confirms, concretely and somewhat brutally, that the past is elsewhere and always will be.

I carry my houses inside me, and this is, I think, the only form of repossession available to me. The cottage with the apple tree. The factory flat and its gold afternoon light. The shared house and its undirected social warmth. The house in the other country, with the tea service, and the morning I walked through each room before leaving.

I have been, on reflection, fortunate in my houses. More fortunate than I knew while I was in them, which is perhaps always the way with the things we love most clearly in retrospect. You live in a place, and you note that the light is good and the sounds are right, and you move on because moving on seemed necessary. And then years later you understand what you were in, and you are grateful, and you are also sad, and both of these responses are correct.

The houses continue without me. They hold other people now, other accumulated mornings, other particular qualities of autumn light. I have no claim on them except the private one of having loved them, which is, in the end, a claim that cannot be disputed.

I am still learning the current house. It has not yet shown me everything it has. There is a quality the kitchen has in early morning that I have noticed twice but not yet understood. There is a sound the garden makes in the wind that I have not yet classified. There is still time.

There is, for now, still time.