Visualization exercise — the Perfect House
Laretta Dear,
Quick visualization exercise: imagine you have all the money you might ever need. You also have your dream house.
It’s a big Mediterranean villa overlooking the sea, with an enormous pool throwing ripples of sunshine back at you while you sip on a Martini. OK, piña colada if you prefer. Just bear with me.
There’s a gardener coming every week to manage the rose garden. Inside, there’s a double ceiling over the living area, with a passerelle for bedroom access. You’ve always wanted a passerelle. It’s a sort of suspended bridge above the loft. Fancy.
The high-tech kitchen has all those gadgets you’ve drooled over when watching cooking shows, like double ovens and rotisserie devices with many settings. The dinning room overlooks the garden. There’s floor-to-ceiling glass panels. The air conditioning is running constantly in the summer heatwave.
The heating runs all winter as well. The glass panels are sucking all the heat out. All the heat rises in the double ceiling, so the empty passerelle is the warmest place in all the house.
The pool is wasting water from the communal reservoir, even though this season had worse droughts than ever. In the winter the chlorinated water will be flushed and the pool walls cleaned. It’s so hot that the gardener is using chemical solutions once a month to get rid of the algae. It smells weird. You don’t bathe in it.
It always ends up like this for me when I do this exercise, whether I go for a mountain, sea or lake house. My ecological anxieties just bubble up to the surface. No matter what real estate fantasy I indulge in — and my mind is filled with ideas — it’s always eventually ruined by the menace of my carbon footprint and capitalism-induced greed. Instead of my dream spaces making me feel good, they make me feel guilty for even imagining them. The Martini doesn’t help either.
Lately I have resorted to involving my carbon footprint into the fantasy instead. I imagine my dream zero emission home, the cool enormous geothermal system and solar panel arrays I’ve set up and paid for all the community to use (I have all the money, remember?).
The tiny surface and overall volume makes my house easy to heat and cozy. For the winter, there’s a Rocket mass heater that I get going with dead sticks from the woods around the house. It’s made of materials that, when I’m gone, will either compost in place, or be used in another build. I can repair most of my house myself.
I don’t have a pool.
Instead, there’s a tiny water surface for summer breezes right next to the house and a natural pond for fish and wildlife further away. It works as a water storage for the drought proof local species garden and food forest I’ve set up. There’s food in there to feed the whole village school, which it does.
The kitchen gadgets, I realized I actually don’t really use them. I eat mostly fresh veggies from the garden. The outside kitchen is the one I use the most. I’ve made an earthen oven that I light up with dead sticks I gather myself.
The house still overlooks the sea.
The UK Infrastructure Carbon Review (here) indicates that more than 50% of a building’s Carbon Reduction Potential happens in the Planning and Design stage.
Building less, building smarter, building mindfully. Materials and technology are important, but simply knowing what we want is the best place to start.
I know I always hammer on about how a house project is supposed to come out of the land it belongs to, not out of our own ego-filled imagines of the house we deserve. So if you’re queasy about this, use an existing land you know. Take a minute to visualize the perfect house.
Don’t mind the eco-anxiety. Just try to go beyond the bling and into the essential.
The essential element of any home is the feel of it.
Essentially yours,
Jo
Thank you for reading Jo’s Epistolary. This post is public so feel free to share it.
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