'In London or New York, such real estate would have long since been rechristened a mews,' writes Gemma Tipton
I SHARED A cab home from a party with an artist over from New York. Back home, he has an apartment in Manhattan, but also - to escape - a place somewhere upstate. Now as far as living well goes, an apartment in New York and "somewhere upstate" sound pretty good to me, but when we turned into my street, my companion found himself absolutely enchanted with where I live.
I'm in one of those forgotten streets, hidden behind massive shadow-casting apartment blocks at the edge of the city centre. It's one of those areas you tend to describe by where it's near - as in "sort of The Liberties, and down from Dolphin's Barn". The cottages (it's a street of cottages) are tiny, smaller than the minimum sizes now allowed for one-bedroomed apartments. A generation ago families of 10 were reared in them, and they're like puzzle boxes - how can you arrange, rearrange, squeeze in your sofa, find space for a bicycle? If you have people over for dinner, it's handy if one of your guests can be in the bathroom at all times. My neighbours, with two young kids, find the puzzle even harder, and we look at the new apartments and think of all the space they must have, the light and the views. For my artist friend that evening, the idea of a cottage in the middle of the city was one to conjure with. In London or New York, such real estate would have long since been swathed in geraniums, tarted up and rechristened a mews. It would, no doubt, become highly desirable instead of just about affordable.
The idea of how we might live leads many of us to make choices based on what we think things will be like when we get there. In my dream of an apartment in the city, plus country retreat to escape to, I don't think of the traffic-choked drives to get from one to the other. I don't picture my country place as being slightly damp and half-neglected because I'm never quite as not-busy as I intend to be. Or that I'd spend all weekend there doing essential repairs, emptying mouse traps, stuff like that. Meanwhile, any American enchanted with my street probably wouldn't think of the dark, or the tiny size; they wouldn't make the connection that living in a two-roomed cottage is really the same as living in a tiny ground-floor flat.
Speaking of flats, there are some beyond the other side of the street. We're sandwiched, in fact, between flats and apartments. It's funny how we borrowed the word "apartment" from America, prefixed it with "luxury", and now have something to separate one idea of living in vertically stacked boxes from another. I went out with a (different) man from New York for a while, and he used to call his apartment "my flat", with a sort of deliberate European affectation. Flats? Apartments? It was a bit like an architectural version of "you say potato" and, if I'd noticed it earlier, it should have told me how incompatible we really were.
We're sold all sorts of ideas in the name of "how we live". There are lofts: gorgeous in films where a character needs to be just that little bit bohemian, but generally hell to heat. There are the newly built suburbs, where everyone gets a garden, but a Spar and perhaps a Costa Coffee have to stand in for a real village centre. Maybe falling house prices will let people make better choices, but many more will be stuck, simply because they can't sell their decidedly undreamy "dream homes".
A book called Living Normally(by Trevor Naylor and Niki Medlik) shows something more real. The homes in the book contain Busy Lizzies, mug trees, lopsided crafts made by kids and grandkids, drying washing, postcards, gym equipment, draylon sofas and souvenir donkeys from Spain. Living Normallymakes you realise the gap between life as you imagine it and life as you live it. It's not that seductive "lifestyle porn" that makes you think wistfully of white upholstery, Nigella kitchen accessories, and €100 cushions, but it does - for a brief while - make you much more content with what you actually have.
After the artist went on to his hotel, I sat up for a bit with a cup of tea. His admiration for my house made me like it more; its disadvantages became charming, its downsides enviable. Perhaps the people in the apartments at the front look down at my street and wish they were there, while I stand at my door looking up at them and envying them their balconies and their light. I don't know what all the different people in my area dream of, but I can guarantee it's of something else.