Shifting priorities

Photo: Trent van der Jagt

As if 2021 wasn’t disruptive enough, at the end of last year we moved house two weeks before Christmas. While the timing was less than ideal, our new home ticked the most important criteria when house-hunting during a pandemic: Could we do a lockdown here?

COVID has rewritten our relationship with the four walls we live in. One description I love is our homes have transformed from launchpads into space stations. During the past two years we’ve pushed our terraces to the limit, forcing them to operate as co-working spaces, schools, gyms, movie theatres, restaurants and for many of us, the local pub.

We’re not the first generation to feel this shift on the home front. There’s a well-established link between pandemics and pivotal changes to residential design.

It was during the flu pandemic of 1918 that homeowners began installing guest bathrooms downstairs to stop guests traipsing unwanted germs through the rest of the house. Regardless of whether these changes are physical or symbolic, it’s interesting how global events shift our meaning of home.

Perhaps it was thanks to all this disruption that packing up our beloved terrace beside the dog park last year felt especially poignant. That home was a chapter of our life, memories wrapped up in a cream exterior with forest green trim.

We talk about homes in relation to our impact on them, how we decorate and renovate a space, but as I waited for the removal van to arrive, I realised how much that home had shaped me.

It held our world for five years; keeping us safe through two lockdowns, nurturing our son from a toddler to primary school student. It welcomed our friends and guarded their secrets and it was the place we always landed at the end of our best and worst days. No wonder it was hard to say goodbye.

Now we’re at the beginning of a new chapter, less than a kilometre up the road from our old one. And while moving house is exhausting and it may take another six months before I have the energy to unpack those last three boxes in the study, there’s a clarity that comes with chaos. With every object we find a new nook for, every piece of furniture we reposition to feel just right, we are slowly curating the next part of our lives.