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The postman already thinks I’m a bit peculiar, but we reached a new low this morning. As he careened into the driveway in his little red van, he spotted me through the window, standing on a ladder in my pants with a feather duster in my hand. There was a perfectly innocent explanation (I’d accidentally set off the smoke alarm and was trying to prod it with the handle), but he didn’t hang around to hear it. I always seem to be up a ladder when the postie comes. Last week, it was because some slate tiles had blown off our roof.
My wife and I have moved home every three years for as long as we’ve been together. If I close my eyes, I can taste the acrid adhesive of brown packing tape. We live almost permanently on a building site: one year, we ate Christmas turkey off a DeWalt toolbox; another she was giving birth in the bedroom upstairs while an Irishman called Dave cheerily installed our new kitchen.
It’s ironic, really: the higher you go up the property ladder, the more time you spend on an actual ladder. To be clear, our house is wonderful, and we’re extremely lucky. It’s a privilege to have a home at all. But I can’t deny that the maintenance drives me mad. I feel ashamed to admit this, but sometimes I fantasise about climbing back down a rung or two.
A study of suburban households in the US between 1985 and 2013 by the behavioural economist Clément Bellet suggests that housing satisfaction has remained the same over that period, despite the amount of space per person increasing by around 50 per cent. In the same way that above a certain threshold, a bump in salary has no effect on happiness, moving to a bigger house once it is above a certain size doesn’t increase wellbeing. We tend to have a honeymoon period for the first year or so, then satisfaction decreases, before levelling out to where it was before the move.
Having co-founded two estate agencies, The Modern House and Inigo, I appreciate the irony of what I’m about to say: maybe we should think twice before moving.
The idea of a new home is inherently exciting because it gives us the chance to reinvent ourselves. The former FT journalist Lucy Kellaway impulsively bought a timber-framed house in Hackney through The Modern House after being seduced by its triangular geometry, Japanese-inspired pond and curvaceous Corian kitchen worktop. She was possessed, she wrote, by “a dubious and surely dangerous conviction that this house would make me both happier and more interesting”.
Before we bought our house, there was a particular image of the garden in the sales details that lured me in and wouldn’t let go. It looked like the kind of thing that might happen if Slim Aarons got a job at Country Life magazine: a Modernist-inspired treehouse perched in an apple orchard. The reality? The treehouse blew down in a gale just after we moved in, and the kids never had a chance to use it.
Is the joy to be found in imagining a new life rather than living it? As humans, we’re hard-wired to look for the next thing. The neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp identified seven networks of emotion in the brain, the most powerful of which is “seeking”. For me, an afternoon at an antiques fair is just as fun if I come away empty-handed, in the same way that I can spend hours online looking at cars I’ll never buy and holidays I’ll never go on. It’s the seeking that administers a syringe of dopamine. The next place is always the “dream” home because it holds the promise of a life yet to be lived. But, once the novelty has worn off, you’ll still be the same person with the same hangups.
Wherever you live now, the chances are it does a more than adequate job. Familiarity breeds contempt, but it also breeds contentment. The longer we live in a location, the more we see the same faces and hear familiar voices. We might stop and talk to a fellow dog-walker in the park or divulge our problems to the hairdresser. All of us go about our daily rituals, and, over time, these routines begin to synchronise with those of the people around us.
David Seamon, professor of architecture at Kansas State University, uses the term “place ballet” to describe this environmental phenomenon. Recurring encounters with familiar strangers encourage us to feel part of something bigger than ourselves. We start to notice others more and develop greater empathy. This strengthens our feelings of attachment to the place we live in, and so a cycle of positive reinforcement develops over time.
My family and I have lived in our current house for nearly five years now, which is something of a record. By committing to one place, we’ve begun to form deep social connections. My sister-in-law has moved nearby with her family; the kids have friends at school; I’ve been living out a midlife crisis on the local running track with a group of dads. We belong here. Of course, life isn’t always a bed of David Austin roses, and there’s one particular relationship that may be irretrievably compromised: in my case, the postman never rings twice.
Matt Gibberd is a broadcaster and author of “A Modern Way to Live”
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