Fictional House Hunting
It's the literary version of Right Move! Five houses I fancy moving into - from a Greek villa to an Isle of Wight party house.
Welcome friends to an Easter weekend edition of Book(ish), in which I combine two of my passions: books and ogling dream houses.
I love houses - and not just my own. I’m fascinated by houses in films (especially anything directed by Nancy Meyers); other people’s homes; I appreciate people who don’t pull the curtains at dusk, so you catch a glimpse of the bustle of home as you walk by. Give me a hot coffee and an interiors magazine and I am a happy woman (“Why yes, I do fancy that lampshade. Eleventy-hundred pounds you say?”) I even enjoy house-hunting, and despite being settled, an idle perusal of property websites, imagining lives I will never lead - “Oo, look what we could buy if we moved to this tiny hamlet in the middle of nowhere!” And I adore a good fictional house.
Fictional houses often loom large - a silent character. Manderley in Rebecca is so crucial it claims both the classic opening (‘Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again’) and the ending. And so many of the best children’s books begin with a child displaced to an unknown house. Think of orphan Sylvia who joins her plucky cousin Bonnie in grand Willoughby Chase with its secret passages and grand library . Mary Lennox, dispatched from India to Misselthwaite Manor on the Yorkshire moors. A rambling house of secrets, “pictures and fine old furniture and things that's been there for ages”, and a secret walled garden. The Pevensie children, evacuated to the Professor Digory Kirke’s house in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - “the sort of house that you never seem to come to the end of; and it was full of unexpected places”. The safe haven of Three Chimneys in The Railway Children.
When I was around my daughter’s age, I attempted to write a book set in a rambling English house during a sultry summer (err, hello The Go-Between?), where youths lounge on lawns in tennis whites and pursue girls in sprigged muslin frocks through yew mazes and along secret corridors hung with family portraits. I still think this is An Idea although it’s possible I suffer from an overdose of Merchant Ivory films at an impressionable age. You know: tensions simmer as matrons sit beneath sunshades and stir tea in fine china cups, and cocktails are served in the drawing room. (That’s a very beverage-heavy unwritten novel.)
I ought to add that I am uncharacteristically decisive, but extremely selective when it comes to houses - real or fictional. I know almost immediately if they feel right. It’s all about the feeling. Here are five which more than pass muster - I’d happily move into any of them.