I have lived in a lot of houses. But there has been one common denominator among the many variables | Alice Robinson
If every home we live in looks the same, then people make homes, not the other way around
When we lived in the country before the pandemic, I drove my children past a building site on the way to school. Green farmland unfurled on one side of the road, but the other side had been subdivided. New houses were going up. My children called one house The Mansion – less of a compliment and more an attempt to grapple for a word that would convey the monstrous proportions of the building.
The Mansion loomed over the road with such aggressive dominance that I felt waves of fatigue crash over me every time we shot past. When the windows were in, labourers started on the driveway, laying boulders. The rocks were so big a crane was brought in to install them. The effect was of a house that seemed born of some catastrophe wrecked on the landscape; as if, like a meteorite, it had smashed into the earth.
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Read the original article at The Guardian