Keeping a house you rarely see
For owners abroad: how a house is opened, aired and readied, so that it never feels closed.
A house that is lived in for six weeks a year spends the other forty-six slowly forgetting it has an owner. Nothing dramatic. A tap dripping into a basin nobody hears. Salt on the shutters. A smell in the linen cupboard that was not there in June. None of it is a disaster, and all of it is what you notice in the first ten minutes of your holiday.
I have opened a great many houses after a long absence, my own first and then other people’s. The order rarely changes.
First, the air. Before anything is unpacked or cleaned, every window and shutter is opened, and the water runs in every tap until it runs clear and cold. A closed house keeps its smell in the soft things, so the cushions and the mattresses go out into the sun if the day allows.
Then the quiet things that fail without telling anyone. The water heater switched off to save power and never switched back on. The fridge still lit, and no longer cold. The smoke alarm that waits for the first night to complain. These are checked against a list, because memory is a poor inspector.
Then the house as you left it, which is rarely the house as you remember it. You remember the good olive oil in the cupboard. The cupboard remembers that it ran out in October.
The usual mistake is to close a house as if for winter and open it as if for a party. Both are done in a hurry, on either side of a long gap, and the gap is where the trouble starts. A house kept well is visited in between and lived in for an hour: windows open, taps run, the post moved, the garden looked at by someone who remembers how it looked last time.
Then the arrival. The house manual says what goes in the fridge, and it should. But what makes a house feel expected is smaller than that. The lamp by the door left on if you land after dark. Hot water from the first tap. A note on the table with the two things that changed while you were away, and nothing else.
None of this is difficult. It is simply easy to forget, and a house cannot remind you. That is the whole of the work: to remember on the house’s behalf, so that you walk in and it feels as though you only stepped out for the afternoon.
Aladdin