The property industry loves a dream home. We put the phrase in property descriptions, advertising campaigns and social posts, usually alongside photographs of beautiful kitchens, enormous windows, perfectly dressed bedrooms and the sort of bathrooms that appear never to have encountered a damp towel or an open tube of toothpaste.
And, to be clear, I like nice things. I can appreciate great architecture, beautiful interiors, a fabulous kitchen and some suitably bougie furnishings as much as the next person. I'm also fortunate enough to have spent most of my working life going in and out of some incredible homes, so I'm hardly about to start arguing that the property itself doesn't matter.
But a recent conversation made me think about what we actually mean when we call somewhere a "dream home", because I'm increasingly convinced that the property industry has got the emphasis the wrong way round.
Dream homes aren't determined by their architectural style, luxury furnishings or the name on the kitchen appliances. They're created by the people who live in them, and by how they choose to live—and love—there.
That thought came from a conversation with Heather on The Viking Chats. We talked about property and careers, but a significant part of our conversation was about something far more personal. Heather was diagnosed with cancer at just 41 and went through around 18 months of chemotherapy, surgery, radiotherapy and further treatment. Inevitably, an experience like that changes the way you look at life, but what interested me was how openly Heather talked about everything surrounding the illness too: her marriage, children, career, independence, the pressure she'd put on herself and what she'd learned about the things that really matter.
This isn't an article about cancer. I wouldn't presume to write one. But our conversation made me think a lot about home, relationships and the strange way we spend our lives chasing a better version of the former while occasionally neglecting the latter.
The life inside the property
One of the privileges of being an estate and letting agent is that you see properties at incredibly different stages of people's lives.
We've helped couples find their first home together and watched them wrestle with the question of whose furniture survives the move. We've seen babies arrive and spare bedrooms disappear. We've helped families realise that the home they once thought was enormous suddenly feels considerably smaller once children, toys, pushchairs and all the other paraphernalia of family life have colonised every available surface.
People relocate for jobs, move to be nearer schools, upsize, downsize, separate, start again, become landlords almost accidentally and eventually watch children leave home, at which point they can finally reclaim the room that's apparently been storing fourteen years' worth of crap.
Property is always there, but it's really the backdrop to something much more interesting: life.
Heather talks in the podcast about the reality of trying to balance a career, children, marriage and home, and about how easy it is to lose yourself somewhere in the middle of all those responsibilities. She describes herself as fiercely independent and acknowledges that, before her illness, she had a tendency to take responsibility for almost everything. If something needed doing, she'd do it. Even something as mundane as the washing could become another job she'd rather handle herself because then she knew it had been done the way she wanted.
I suspect an awful lot of people will recognise themselves in that.
You buy the home, build the career, have the children and gradually accumulate all the responsibilities that accompany the life you wanted. The irony is that you can become so busy maintaining that life that you forget to enjoy much of it.
Home itself can become another project. There's always another room to decorate, something to repair, a piece of furniture to replace or an improvement that will apparently make everything complete. Instagram certainly hasn't helped. We now have access to an endless parade of immaculate homes inhabited, as far as I can tell, by people who don't own charging cables, children's toys or a laundry basket.
There's nothing wrong with wanting your home to look beautiful. But the older I get, the less convinced I am that beautiful and happy have very much to do with one another.
I've been in modest homes that feel wonderful the moment you walk through the door and spectacular properties where you can almost feel the tension before anybody says hello. The bricks and mortar can influence how we live, but they can't determine whether the people inside them are happy.
There isn't really a forever home
"Forever home" is another phrase our industry loves.
I understand what people mean by it. Usually it's the property where they can imagine raising their family, putting down roots and staying for decades. There's something reassuring about believing you've found the place that will work forever.
The problem is that people don't stay the same forever.
The property that's perfect when you're 28 may not be right when you're 38. Your priorities change. Children arrive. Careers move in unexpected directions. Relationships evolve. Parents get older. Health can change without warning. Children eventually become adults themselves and the four-bedroom house you once desperately needed suddenly has two rooms nobody enters except when they're looking for somewhere to store a suitcase.
Heather's experience is an extreme reminder of just how quickly the version of life we think we're living can change. Being diagnosed with cancer at 41, with young children and everything else that comes with family life, wasn't something she could have planned around. Suddenly the things that occupied her attention before existed alongside treatment, fear and the uncertainty of what happened next.
We sometimes behave as though finding the right property means we've somehow completed the puzzle. We've bought the home, ticked that box and can get on with living the life we imagined would happen there.
Real life is much messier.
That's one reason I've always liked the fact Base operates across both sales and lettings. There's still an odd obsession in Britain with presenting home ownership as the final destination and renting as something people do while waiting to get there. Life doesn't work in such a convenient straight line.
Sometimes the right home is somewhere you own for twenty years. Sometimes it's a rented flat that gives you exactly what you need for eighteen months while everything else changes. Sometimes selling a property represents success; sometimes buying one does. Sometimes moving into somewhere smaller gives you a better life than stretching yourself financially for an extra bedroom you barely use.
The right home is the one that works for the life you're actually living, rather than the one you're told you ought to want.
Sometimes somebody else has to have it
One part of the conversation with Heather that I particularly liked was around relationships and the idea of capacity.
Life isn't conveniently balanced between two people. There are days when you're both firing on all cylinders, but there are plenty when one person has far more to give than the other. Work has been awful. Someone hasn't slept. A child is struggling. A parent needs help. You're ill, worried, exhausted or simply having a terrible day for no particularly dramatic reason.
We talked about an idea sometimes referred to as the "100 rule". Rather than assuming a relationship should always be 50/50, you recognise that capacity changes. If I'm at 85 and my partner is at 22, this isn't the moment for me to start complaining that they're not contributing their 50. I've got capacity, so I've got it. On another day those numbers may be completely reversed.
I like that because it feels considerably closer to how real relationships work than the idea of everything being divided neatly down the middle.
Heather's illness made accepting that support unavoidable at times. Someone who was used to being fiercely independent had to learn that she couldn't always be the person who carried everything, and that allowing somebody else to say "I've got this" isn't weakness. It's part of being in a partnership.
There's a lesson in there that extends well beyond periods of serious illness. We can be incredibly good at measuring what everybody else is or isn't doing. Who cooked last. Who emptied the dishwasher. Who got up with the children. Who organised the holiday. Who remembered the birthday present. Who has had the harder week at work.
Anyone who has lived with another human being for long enough will know how quickly that scoreboard becomes exhausting.
A happy home probably isn't one where everybody contributes exactly the same amount every day. It's one where, over time, people notice when someone they love hasn't got much left and are prepared to carry a little more without turning it into a debt that needs repaying.
No kitchen extension can give you that.
When Mum and Dad remember they're also two people
Another part of Heather's story that really resonated was her description of getting away with her husband after treatment.
Like many couples, their relationship had changed after having children. Heather talks about how they hadn't really argued before becoming parents, then suddenly found themselves navigating all the pressures that come with children, careers, a household and the endless logistics of family life. Somewhere in that, it's very easy for two people to stop being themselves and become primarily Mum and Dad.
Their first trip away together after treatment therefore became about more than a holiday. It gave them an opportunity to rediscover each other and, in Heather's telling, to rediscover themselves a little too.
I think there's something quite profound in that because we often design our homes around roles.
We want the family kitchen, the children's bedrooms, the playroom, the home office and the garden. All sensible things. Yet none of those spaces automatically creates the family life pictured in the brochure.
A huge kitchen doesn't make people sit around the table and talk to one another. A cinema room doesn't make a family spend time together. A beautiful bedroom doesn't create intimacy and a landscaped garden doesn't make anybody put their bloody phone down.
The property gives us the space. What happens within it is up to us.
That's perhaps an uncomfortable thing for an estate agent to say because our industry is professionally invested in persuading people that the next property will improve their lives. Sometimes it absolutely will. Moving can shorten a commute, give children their own bedrooms, bring grandparents closer, provide outside space or simply put you somewhere that feels more like you.
But property can't fix everything.
If we're miserable, exhausted or disconnected from the people around us, a prettier kitchen might provide a lovely distraction, but it's unlikely to solve the underlying problem.
Maybe the dream is allowed to change
Heather also talks about emerging from her experience with a different understanding of herself. She knows her limits better. She's less willing to absorb other people's nonsense and more conscious that trying to be everything to everybody can come at an enormous personal cost. The idea of simply returning to the old "normal" doesn't really capture what happens after something so significant; you create a new version of normal around the person you've become.
I think homes work like that too.
We're allowed to change our minds about what we want.
The dream doesn't have to remain the dream just because we once worked incredibly hard to achieve it. You can discover that the big house is more work than it's worth. You can decide you'd rather live somewhere smaller and spend more money travelling. You can realise the postcode that mattered enormously five years ago no longer matters at all. You can sell the family home without betraying the memories created there.
Equally, you can love a rented property deeply even though you don't own a single brick of it.
We sometimes attach memories to buildings so strongly that it feels as though leaving the property means leaving the memories behind. But the first steps, Christmas mornings, disastrous dinner parties, rows, reconciliations, birthdays and ordinary Tuesday evenings that made somewhere home belong to the people who experienced them. They don't disappear when somebody else gets the keys.
Perhaps that's why I increasingly struggle with the idea that a dream home can be identified from a property listing.
We can show you the square footage. We can tell you about the natural light, transport links, original features and exceptionally tasteful Crittall doors. We can tell you whether the service charge is reasonable, what the local market is doing and whether we think the asking price makes sense.
We cannot tell you whether you'll be happy there.
Nobody can.
So, what actually makes a dream home?
Heather's story understandably made me think about courage. My first reaction when hearing what she'd been through was that I'm genuinely not sure I would have been as brave. I'd like to imagine I'd rise to it, particularly if my family needed me to, but I suspect there's every chance I'd crumble.
What I found most interesting, though, wasn't a grand lesson about bravery. It was the smaller things Heather had learned around it: knowing what you can handle, allowing other people to help, understanding your limits, protecting relationships and being a little less concerned about things that ultimately don't matter very much.
Those are probably pretty good ingredients for a home too.
At Base, we've always believed property is fundamentally about people. Yes, we're property geeks. We care about buildings, design, neighbourhoods, architecture and all the weird and wonderful things that make London's homes interesting. Finding someone a property they absolutely love is still one of the best bits of the job.
But perhaps we should be a little more careful about promising dream homes.
We can help you find a brilliant property. We can advise you, negotiate for you and hopefully make the whole bloody process considerably less painful. What we can't supply is the part that ultimately turns those bricks and mortar into somewhere truly special.
You have to bring that yourselves.
Because the dream home isn't really the one with the perfect architecture, the bougie interiors or the beautiful furniture, however nice all of those things might be. It's the place where the people inside are safe enough to struggle, comfortable enough to be themselves, willing to carry each other when necessary and, amongst all the work, washing, children, bills and general chaos of being alive, still remember to enjoy one another.
If you've got that, I'd argue you're already living in a pretty extraordinary home.
