The Lighter Life

And then, all too quickly it seems, it’s the last hug on the doorstep, the taillights at the end of the road, and the particular silence of a big house that has just been emptied of the people who make it make sense.

Once the dust has settled, it’s just the dog and me and the washing, and the bedrooms that need stripping. The boiler has started making that noise, and the gutters and the endless areas of the house look tired without the distraction of conversation filling the space. Spaces that nobody will sleep in until Christmas.

For a long time I assumed downsizing was something that happened to you. It came with a certain age, or a bereavement, or a stairlift. It was what you did when you’d run out of other choices. I’m not sure that’s true any more. Downsizing isn’t about age. It’s about readiness.

After years of holding it all together, running a home and a business and a family whilst managing a thousand invisible jobs that bind all three together, I find myself wistfully imagining a life of simplicity. With that thought comes less responsibility: less to clean, less to worry about, less to insure, mend and keep an eye on. Spaces filled with clarity rather than clutter, defined not by the things in them but by the intention behind them.

Sometimes it’s circumstance that decides for us, and that is hard in its own way. But for many of us it’s something subtler: a recalibration. We don’t want a smaller life. We want a lighter one.

I tried the idea out once, casually, over Sunday lunch. I didn’t mean anything by it. It was just a hypothetical, what if…

You’d think I’d suggested selling the dog.

“But it’s home.” That one word carries a lot. It means the height marks on the kitchen door frame and the bedroom that still has the old posters behind the wardrobe. It means knowing exactly which stair creaks, and the place where Christmas has always happened and, in their minds, always will.

And I understand it, of course I do. I built that feeling on purpose. It took decades of weekends and birthdays and homework at the kitchen table, of making sure there was always a light on and something in the oven. When your grown-up children still say “coming home” rather than “coming to see you”, something has gone rather right.

I keep turning over at two in the morning, when the house makes its settling noises, and the dog sighs at the foot of the bed, this niggling thought. My children are adults now. They’re out in the world, working hard and doing everything right, and they still can’t get a foot on the property ladder. Meanwhile we rattle around a house full of equity and empty bedrooms, keeping it warm for visits that come once a month if I’m lucky.

I pose the question: which is the greater act of love? Keeping the family home exactly as it is, as a museum to their childhood, or turning some of it into the deposit on a home of their own?

Perhaps the question isn’t whether they’ll lose their home. Perhaps it’s whether home was ever the house at all.

I understand this more than most. I have spent thirty-five years creating homes for other people. The essence of my career has been deciphering the lifestyles of the people living in the house. If there’s one thing I know for certain, it’s that it was never really about the bricks and mortar. Walk into any house, and I can name its desirability in a heartbeat: the light, the proportions, the way one room opens into the next. But a home’s heart is the people in it. It’s the voices in the kitchen and the coats piled on the bannister. A beautiful room without them is just a very well-dressed stage set.

Once you accept that, something shifts. If home is the people, then home can move. And suddenly everything becomes a possibility.

Romance starts to creep into the corners of your mind. Is it a cottage with a rose garden, wisteria hanging over a pergola, and a kitchen table big enough for everyone at Christmas? Somewhere manageable, rather than an exhausting expanse of rooms so overwhelming that the jobs get put off for another day, and then another.

Or is it a swanky apartment, perhaps overlooking the sea, where the view does the decorating for you? Perhaps it is London’s bright lights on a permanent draw, where walking home from the theatre or from dinner with friends feels like the ultimate luxury?

Either way, less maintenance means more freedom. And with freedom comes the thing I’ve been quietly postponing for most of my adult life: travel. During the years of working to pay endless school fees, exotic holidays were a whim over a cup of coffee and the Sunday supplement. I’d fold the page over, promise myself one day, and then go and put another wash on.

Talk to almost any young person today, and you’ll hear the same frustration: owning a home of their own feels close to impossible. The age at which they can take that first step onto the property ladder, and begin to think about a family of their own, keeps creeping later and later. The financial recalibration is almost shouting at me. The equity tied up in these walls could help my children onto that ladder, and I don’t miss that.

This thought is not so ridiculous. The bills would shrink. The upkeep would no longer run my weekends, which could finally be free: Saturdays that belong to me again rather than problem-fixing or waiting around for the man who comes to kick-start the boiler. The money could go on a plane ticket instead of a new roof. I’d have a home I could lock up and leave for a month without a moment’s worry. Beneath all of it is that ultimate longing for simplicity.

For the first time in a long time, it all feels mentally lighter. It feels possible.

So why, if it all feels so possible, do we hold on so tightly?

The answer lies in two small words: family home.

I remember when my parents sold theirs. I fought it at every turn. I knew perfectly well it was the best thing for them. The house had become too big, too much work and too much worry. By then, I had a family home of my own, a mortgage, children, and a hallway full of wellies, so I had no practical claim on it at all. And still, it was an enormous emotional wrench.

Because a home is far bigger than owning a house, a home proves we built something that lasted. It’s the one fixed point while children grow up, careers change, and friends move away. It’s where we are known without having to explain ourselves. Memories are embedded in every room, and the things we collect, keep, store and, let’s be honest, occasionally hoard become the fabric of it: the chipped jug that was always on the dresser, the drawer of birthday cards nobody could bring themselves to throw away. Take them out of their rooms, and they become just things in boxes.

Without that anchor, are we ourselves a little at sea?

We don’t leave homes. We leave versions of ourselves behind.

This is the question I can’t quite answer, and I don’t know if anyone can do it for us. When illness, money, or the stairs decide for us, it’s painful, but clear. There’s no one to argue with. But when nothing is forcing our hand, when the only reason to go is a longing to live more simply and more lightly, guilt creeps in at every turn.

It is guilt that we’re dismantling something intrinsic that we sense our children still need. Guilt that we’re being ungrateful for a house we worked so hard for. Guilt, if I’m truthful, that wanting a lighter life for ourselves is somehow selfish. As though, after decades of putting everyone else first, we still need a reason other than I would like to.

And I do long for it. I can see the cottage, the roses, a table set for fewer but no less loved. I can see the trips I’ve postponed for thirty years, and the passport finally getting used.

And yet, as I sit here writing this, I still love this house. I love the house I created: every colour I agonised over and every room I made for the people I love. Both things are true at once, and I’ve stopped expecting one to cancel out the other.

This isn’t a decision at all, not yet. Perhaps it’s just a thought, now spoken aloud, that will quietly gather moss over the coming months or years. It will settle and soften and grow, until one ordinary Sunday evening, when the taillights have disappeared down the road, and the dog has sighed at my feet, I’ll simply know the time is right.

For me.