A place to call home

A place to call home is not necessarily your own house. Even though she may not live in her dream home (yet), journalist Caroline Buijs gets to enjoy beautiful places by ‘borrowing’ them from time to time.

In his book The Architecture of Happiness, Swiss-British philosopher Alain de Botton writes that you can call a place home without actually owning it: ‘In turn, those places whose outlook matches and legitimates our own, we tend to honor with the term “home”. Our homes do not have to offer us permanent occupancy or store our clothes to merit the name. To speak of home in relation to a building is simply to recognize its harmony with our own prized internal song. Home can be an airport or library, a garden or a motorway diner.’

Vacation homes

Vacations are the perfect time for a homestay: living in a ‘real’ house when the owners are away on vacation. The best part is that it offers you a glimpse into someone else’s life and it’s a great way to get decorating ideas for your own home. If there is a piano in the house you can watch a YouTube video and learn how to play your first notes, or you can experience what it is like to have a rooftop terrace or a hammock in the yard. The house has character because someone actually lives in it.

I’ll never forget the homestay where I finally got to live in the house I dreamed of living in as a kid: a Swedish-style house like Pippi Longstocking’s. That was definitely, as De Botton says, in harmony with my own prized internal song. It had a nicely filled bookcase, a cabinet full of different vintage china cups and plates, a wooden veranda (without a horse but still with a beautiful view), flowered wallpaper and a typical Swedish fireplace. And the icing on the cake was that the Swedish author (and creator of Pippi Longstocking) Astrid Lindgren herself had stayed there before—she and the owner were friends—so it immediately became a hit with my daughter too.