The greatest reward for creating a beautiful home is more emotional than financial, says Giles Kime, interiors editor of Country Life.
Bringing a tired seventeenth-century cottage in Hampshire to life over the past few years has focused my mind on how one values a home. Is it really just another asset to be traded like any other? Or does its true value lie in the way it will enhance the time we’ll spend there?
In the last century, home ownership was high on the political agenda, from David Lloyd George’s ‘homes fit for heroes’ slogan – which enshrined his commitment to providing quality housing for soldiers returning from World War I – to Margaret Thatcher’s promotion of a property-owning democracy that stoked the housing boom of the 1980s. By the eve of the millennium, home ownership had risen from less than 20% to over 70%, precipitating an unhealthy fixation of the type that Lord Darlington describes in Oscar Wilde’s play, Lady Windermere’s Fan, as knowing ‘the price of everything and the value of nothing’.
Too often, the value of a property is seen purely in financial terms rather than its capacity to enhance our quality of life. As a result, much of our focus is on making changes that will appeal to future owners rather than ourselves. Yet, as Winston Churchill, that most quotable of British prime ministers, stated when he argued for the Blitz-damaged House of Commons to be rebuilt exactly as it was, ‘We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.’ In other words, when we plan a house, we need to put ourselves first.
Buildings that shape us in a positive way don’t have to be huge: too often, homeowners look to expand their homes before they consider how existing spaces will be used – and whether a successful outcome lies in carefully considered evolution rather than expensive revolution. It’s also rare that the dazzling bells and whistles of state-of-the-art appliances shape us – instead, it’s the comforting details of fitted and freestanding joinery, the beauty of good quality timber and textiles and well-engineered furniture, as well as colours and collections that make us feel at home.
These are the investments in a house that offer the most significant return, not just because they enhance quality of life but because they have a capacity for longevity, often improving as they age. You don’t have to look far for evidence of the long-term benefits of beautifully crafted, carefully considered interiors: the wealth of historic houses in Britain bears testament to the value they deliver not just over a lifetime but also as they pass from generation to generation. Discarding furniture that is just a few years old rarely offers much feel-good factor.
The other quality these houses share is timelessness; good design never dates, whether Georgian, Victorian, modernist or twentyfirst century. A capacity to age has less to do with making a visual statement and more to do with quality, physical comfort, and performance. As we complete the work on our cottage, we are very much hoping that our investment of time, money and thought will be repaid in dividends that are much more than merely financial.