Living · 5 min read
The Art of Exceptional Living
Why the finest houses are organised around routine rather than reception — and how to read that in a plan.
The best houses we have sold have one thing in common, and it is not the entrance hall.
They are organised around the parts of the day that repeat. Where the light falls at breakfast. Where you can sit alone at four in the afternoon without crossing a reception room. Whether it is possible to make coffee without waking a house of guests. These are unglamorous concerns and they are, without exception, what owners talk about after a year in residence.
The reception paradox
Houses at this level are still frequently designed as though entertaining were their principal function, and photographed as though a party were about to begin. In practice, most are entertained in perhaps a dozen evenings a year. The other three hundred and fifty are ordinary, and a plan that only performs when full is a plan that is empty most of the time.
The correction is not to build smaller. It is to build a house with a small house inside it — a kitchen, a family room, a study and one bedroom that can operate as a complete residence when everything else is closed and unlit. Every house in the Signature Collection can do this. It is close to a condition of entry.
A great house is one you can live in alone without feeling that you are rattling around inside someone else's idea of you.
Light, and the discipline of orientation
Morning light and evening light do entirely different things to a room, and a plan that ignores the difference will disappoint in ways that are hard to articulate on a viewing. Breakfast rooms want the east. Rooms used after seven want a western aspect, or at least a view of a sky that is doing something.
It is worth visiting a house twice, at opposite ends of the day. We arrange second viewings at a different hour as a matter of routine, and clients change their minds more often than they expect.
Materials that age well
Exceptional living is partly a question of what a house looks like in year seven. Stone, unlacquered brass, oiled timber and lime plaster all improve, or at least soften convincingly. High-gloss lacquer, mirrored glass and polished chrome do not; they record every mark and can only be maintained back to a factory finish, never allowed to age into one.
This is not an argument for austerity. It is an argument for choosing surfaces that are allowed to have a history, in a house that will have one.
The quiet test
Finally, listen. Stand in the principal bedroom with the doors closed and note what you can hear: the pool plant, a lift motor, the neighbour's generator, a road two streets away that carries at night. Acoustic separation is expensive to retrofit and almost never mentioned in a brochure, and it is the single most common regret we hear from buyers who moved quickly.
Everything above can be checked in an afternoon, without a survey, by anyone. It is remarkable how rarely it is done.
