It was May 2020. My then-fiancé (now husband) and I were on our daily government-sanctioned walk around the park, the only time I wasn't forced to listen to our neighbour's full-volume Duolingo. 'Don't you just want a bit more peace and space?' I said in exasperation. 'Why don't we move to the country?'
We had planned to sell my one-bedroom flat in Central London and his four-bedroom home in East London's suburbs and buy somewhere together in town. But with work suddenly remote, Rightmove revealed we could swap our properties for a six-bedroom home with its own one-acre orchard in Somerset, surrounded by nothing but fields. So we sold our London properties, which gave us a fairly sizeable deposit, and also took out a large-ish mortgage to buy the house. Did we need six bedrooms when it was just us with no plans to ever have kids? No, but we could have it and, having spent the past 15 years in a tiny apartment, have it I felt I must.
On moving-in day we ran around the two living rooms, the banquet-sized dining room, all six bedrooms. All the boxes went into one room that we shut the door on - some things stayed packed for months. The excitement of having a whole room you could shove stuff into and never have to see? Mariah Carey supposedly has a room dedicated to wrapping gifts, and this was my equivalent. We bought a ride-on mower to tend to the orchard. And we were living the Good Life! I cultivated a vegetable patch, planted courgettes (all eaten by slugs), pumpkins (ditto) and potatoes (happily, I was inundated). And with my bumper crop of Charlottes, I assimilated to the country idyll.
But as for the house itself, well, it hadn't been decorated since 1972. We spent a fortune on new wiring, new heating, ripping apart rooms we weren't really using and didn't have furniture for and then didn't have the money to put back together. We focused our energy on the kitchen, a double-sized island installed on the flagstone flooring. Having so much worktop for prepping all those potatoes was a constant source of amazement.
Our next focus was the dining room, a space so large no one sold ready-made tables big enough. I had a £7,000 quote to make a tabletop - just the top - that was long enough to sit 20 around, so instead we pushed two tables together, covered them with tablecloths and felt that would have to do.
It didn't really matter - we only had 20 for dinner once, one Christmas, a few relatives having to BYO chairs. We finished the 'smart lounge' next; our nicest furniture arranged on the newly laid herringbone parquet. We'd got dogs by then and the sofas in that space were too good for them, so we avoided the room and stuck to the squashy couch covered with dog hair in the snug.
Four years after moving in, the orchard maintenance was a chore; weekly mowing of two hours each time became another job on a long list of cleaning, sorting and sprucing that a six-bed home needs constantly. We were still renovating, digging deep into savings accounts and under those doggy-sofa cushions to finish the bathrooms, yet not even using at least a third of the house. One newly completed bedroom had never been slept in by anyone. Despite loving the fresh air, the fields and, yes, that kitchen island, continuing to spend on this beautiful home felt wasteful, negligent and totally unnecessary. 'Don't you just want to sell it?' I said in exasperation to my now-husband last year. Next thing I knew, we were out. Having done so much work to the house we sold it for a tidy profit.
What the joy of all that space taught me is that a big house - and everything that comes with it - is a lifestyle, a huge commitment, a real full-time job in itself. There is plenty to be said for the bucolic fantasy of relaxation and peace, but not when you have a full-time job, too. All we needed, I learned, was a bed, two spaces for us both to work from home, and a sofa big enough for the dogs. A place that needed so little upkeep that we could just enjoy each other's company, where the cleaning didn't take all week to get through. With the money from the Somerset house and only a small mortgage, we bought a two-bed apartment in Kennington, South London, with private shared gardens - maintained by the freeholders as I wasn't falling for that one again. Admittedly there isn't quite enough storage, but it has forced us to edit, to strip back our lives to all we really need. I'm far from Spartan - I still like an artful collection of vases just for the sake of it - but I fully appreciate all the hours I have to see friends and family now that I'm not having to curate a home that could host 20 in one go.
I fell in love with the idea of space without realising how much upkeep that space continually needed. Turns out, real luxury wasn't six bedrooms and an orchard - it was having just enough room to live, but not so much that it consumed our life.