Alain de Botton: Is Your Home Making You Happy?

27:56Alain de Botton:And, yeah, so flexibility of space, good bones is, I think, what you can probably bequeath future generations. And then, you know, but, I mean, we may be living in bits of data, really. And there may not be humans in 200 years' time. So who knows? The concept of a home, there may be only virtual space. Only virtual space may be necessary. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So if we are designing a house or building something or refurbishing something, how do we know that we're doing it for ourselves and for internal reasons rather than for external validation? I mean, there's almost a moral tone to your question.

28:37Alain de Botton:External validation, bad. Internal validation, good. I think it's fine for it to be, you know, an attempt to communicate with the world. I think, and so in that sense, it is about a search maybe for external validation. I mean, one of the sort of ticklish areas is, what do you want people to say? People have housewarming parties. That's telling you something. You want to say, I live here and in a way, judge me for my space, judge me kindly, but please judge me because it is, you know, these are few lines of autobiography and I want them to be read. Then we can get into, you know, what someone saying and could one do, you know i'm a psychotherapist of as of relatively recently and you could do a psychotherapy of somebody's house there's a wonderful uh american psychotherapist called irving yalom who says at one point in one of his books that he always asked to see his clients houses he wants to see where they're living what he doesn't want you know now that's fairly unorthodox way of going about psychotherapy but it's onto something really interesting which is spaces are telling you such a large amount about a person and that's that's okay but they'll be telling you about the healthy bits and the unhealthy bits he's a man after my own heart i think um when when we sort of move our furniture around or we endlessly rearrange things on the mantelpiece and so on that we all do we try and get the spacing exactly right i don't think we okay we but not everyone When one does.

30:10What is one trying to achieve with that, do you think?

30:13Alain de Botton:I mean, it's a fascinating thing that one's trying to translate something inside into something outside, right? And that, you know, you're noticing that the ornament is, when you say it's wrongly placed, I guess we're thinking something about the way that it's placed, which is not capturing our ideals of a good life. you know it's currently suggesting maybe a pinched and unkind way of looking at things or or it's pretentious or it's you know something's like it's wrong um but again how nice not to care but some of us care and what about you know so many of us cohabit as well of course then what happens right because you're trying to all hell breaks loose all hell breaks loose i mean uh i mean so so often it's an area of serious conflict um if you're really lucky uh you and your special friend will share an aesthetic and you can sort of double down on it and explore it and it becomes you know a fantastic joint project in the history of design there have been those sort of relationships i imagine you You know, Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson, when things were going well for them, they might really have sort of enjoyed decorating spaces.

31:32Alain de Botton:Some of the Bloomsbury people, etc. You know, there's some wonderful examples. But on the whole, one person wants to go one way, the other person wants to go another way. And there are real conflicts over mugs and chairs and rugs and colours and all sorts of things. So it's one of the places in which the differences between people can find their most unhappy articulations. I wonder how we solve that. I think one of the things is to go into the reasons why someone likes something. You know, if somebody brings home a rug that seems hideous to you, Ron's going, it's hideous. Say, why do you like it?

32:11Alain de Botton:You know, why do you think you like it? What is it speaking to you of? What are the values? And then sometimes the backstory is really interesting. Like someone might go, you know, my mother was depressed when I was a child and no one laughed and this rug um you know with its um mouth-shaped designs and bright vivid purple and pink scattered decorated bits speaks to me of smiling yeah and um and and a good humor in the face of adversity and i've needed that so much and one might be so moved by this that one would almost like the rug almost yeah you're not convincing me but yeah almost let's move on to this idea of belonging yeah families it seems to me are more dispersed than maybe they've ever been certainly my experience as well is that my friends from my childhood now live in all cities around the world i'm always questioning how do i find which particular quadrant on the earth I should settle in and belong in you know how do I go about that why there why why not somewhere else yeah I agree I think you know we have choice and in an area where in the past we you know we didn't have choice and choice means we've got to find reasons in ourselves conscious reasons where in the past it was just you know the choice was made for us same is true in you know dating in In the olden days, people would just be told, like, this is your partner.

33:42Alain de Botton:That's the next 70 years of your life. That's it. Till death. Now people are in agony because they're allowed to choose from, you know, 10 ,000 people. And they don't know how to choose. And once they've chosen, they think, oh, but what about maybe somebody else was better, etc. You just cannot choose. So total freedom is really quite dizzying. Look, I think for many, many people, there are ultimately reasons. Work is a huge thing, property prices, friends, connections, etc. I think what we're always doing is looking for things that will anchor us to a place. We actually want to be tied down a bit.

34:22Alain de Botton:It's wonderful to have a compelling reason to be somewhere. Do you see it as valuable to commit yourself to one place for a prolonged period of time and just give that a go? because you do see people that are continually moving and trying to put down roots and it doesn't quite work for them. I wonder if there's a value in just committing and saying, okay, well, because isn't it about the social connections actually in the end? I mean, anthropologists have a great time with this one. You know, they'll say that some people are, you know, harking back to the hunter-gatherers and they're always on the move and others are harking back to, you know, agricultural, the settled people.

34:58Alain de Botton:And this picks up two kinds of things in human nature, you know, the farmer. and the hunter. So, you know, those who move are hunters and those who stay are farmers. And that reflects something, you know, longstanding in us. I think we get this sometimes when we go traveling, when we're on holiday and you look up at a lit window in a street in Athens or Amsterdam or somewhere and you think, I wonder what it'd be like to live there. And, you know, for a moment your world slightly wobbles and you think, why do I live where I live? I could just live somewhere else. In actual fact, very few of us really get the chance to do that.

35:38Alain de Botton:You know, there are ties that bind, ties of language and tradition and educational qualifications that are not transferable, etc. It's actually very hard to make your life in a new area. But it's one of the great, you know, fantasies. And I think when we go traveling, it's often the fantasy that underpins the sort of relationship to a place what would it be like to have a home here totally yeah so interesting safety another big word as someone who is sensitive to your surroundings as you've described for for people that maybe don't think about this so much for you what are the characteristics of a space that make it feel psychologically safe would you say um that it's clean that it's ordered that it's not nostalgic.

36:32Alain de Botton:I do have a problem. I mean, I studied history. I'm very interested in the past. Lots of good things have happened. Lots of, you know, I'm not someone who only wants to live right now. But, you know, it is peculiar that when it comes to spaces, I generally don't want to see old things. And it's odd. And that I'm afraid of slipping into an old world that I associate with bad stuff. And bad stuff is a kind of hidebound nature, an ungenerous nature, a class-bound nature. The worst sides of, you know, if you said to somebody, the old world, what are the bad associations? I have that when I encounter many, many old things.

37:27Alain de Botton:So it's strange. It's not universal. I love an old church. I can go to a historic house and see the point of it. When it comes to my own environment, places where I've got to sleep, if I'm choosing a hotel, I don't want to go to Edinburgh's finest old hotel dating back to 1600. I definitely don't want to be there at all. If I'm in Bristol, I don't want to be in Bristol's quaint Tudor-Bethan thing. I definitely want to be in the modern hotel, maybe in the outskirts of town, maybe in the new Docklands area or whatever. I mean, it's very strange. I think I'm afraid of getting stuck in the back pages of a Dickens novel and being very unhappy.

38:15That's so interesting. And what about the characteristics in terms of things like materials

38:20Alain de Botton:and light and things like that so brightness is usually important um i'm afraid of darkness i guess being swallowed up by the dark um so i'm afraid of being swallowed up by the past and i'm afraid of being swallowed up by the dark and you know these are good questions to ask as it were what are you afraid of is a really really good question to ask when you you know why did you pick that glass what are you afraid of in other glasses you know what what might happen if you know in that fork or whatever yeah so it's a really good question um and so i'm afraid of darkness i'm afraid of mess i'm afraid of ancientness um and i'm looking to be pulled in other directions in the environments i feel comfortable in so interesting and then why when this thing about clutter and about tidying up yeah you know marie kondo has been a huge hit and the world of tidying up.

39:11On a psychological level, what do you make of that?

39:15Alain de Botton:Well, if you feel chaotic, you're going to need very, very ordered environments to feel calm in. And I don't think it's a coincidence that as the world has become ever more chaotic and troubled, you know, this thing called minimalism has cropped up. You know, why do we enjoy the paintings of Agnes Martin or Mark Rothko? So, you know, why did minimalism start up in America at a time of huge chaos and noise? There's a wonderful German theorist at the turn of the 20th century called Wilhelm Wöringer, who wrote a book called Abstraction and Empathy. And in this book, he speculated on why different ages have been drawn to either a very exuberant, very rich style or a very pared down style.

40:05and, you know, very much did a,

40:08Alain de Botton:formed a kind of psychological analysis of different ages need different things from their built environment. If you think of the Victorians, they were constructing a modern world that was terrifying to them and because it was really so perturbing of all settled certainties. And so it kicked off this very peculiar nostalgia for the Gothic and, you know, the Middle Ages and Venice and, you know, all sorts of things that still mar the skyline in my view. And, you know, this was very different from the Georgians. So in the 18th century, modernity was exciting. And so, you know, one can look at certain Georgian buildings and think, my goodness, this is a ultra modern, sleek, pared down machine.

40:54Alain de Botton:And then the Victorians, you know, clearly something happens in the sort of geopolitical world, which means, and the spiritual world, which means that that kind of architecture becomes impossible for them and they want something else. So if you didn't live in a modern house, would you go Georgian? Yes. Yeah. Yes. Because you think there's a modernity to it, the spaces. Yeah, absolutely. And that is a fascinating thing that, you know, you can look at Roman architecture and Roman architecture is in many ways to our eyes, modernist, because it's pared that's quite similar to ours. So you can re-find the sort of values, the design values that sit under the term modernism can be found in all ages at all times, in China, in the West, et cetera.

41:45Alain de Botton:It's not really just architecture of the last 100 years. It's a sensibility that crops up in, for example, in monasticism. So you could look at a monastery built in 1200 that is utterly in line with Le Corbusier. in terms of what the building's trying to do and the needs it's trying to address psychologically. It's the same thing. Yeah. Yeah, I often think of John Pawson. He always says his favourite building. Is it Le Cistercien Abbey? Le Cistercien Abbey in Provence or wherever it is. That's right, Le Tourne. Le Tourne, which I've been to, and there's a real purity to it, isn't there? Yeah, yeah.

42:23Alain de Botton:So John Pawson could say, as Mark Rothko said of Turner, um that guy really stole a lot from me um so john fosn could could have said yeah the builders of l 'artorana they stole a lot from me um a lot of the people i speak to have quite defined routines and rituals within their home myself included actually um how do you think routines somehow give meaning to life at home look living is a an extraordinary thing to maintain faith with a sort the basic constituents of life requires quite a lot of make-believe. I mean, we could die at any moment. Our carefully constructed matchstick lives could fall apart at any moment.

43:09Alain de Botton:And we take them so seriously. And we think we've got a name and that we've got a purpose and we think we own things. But actually, all these things are kind of illusions. They're fictions made between people to suggest... Oh, comedy doorbell. someone may need is that alright just let anyone in if there's a delivery just just put it down anywhere not on the kitchen table though because that would be another disaster I love that the other thing about modern houses now there's just everything is computerised silly things like the doorbell is bloody computerised and then of course no one knows where the website is and everyone's forgotten the codes and, you know, okay.

43:55Alain de Botton:So it's very odd being alive on a spinning rock, some distant corner of the Milky Way. And we try and suppress the mystery of existing by having routines and having a thing called breakfast and having, you know, a place where you keep your cereal. We just try and use these things to stop us going nuts. But yeah, it's a fiction. You know, we have a tidy little order. We're sort of polishing our, you know, matchstick on the side of the Titanic. Yeah. no that's how do we know if we're not overdoing it with our routines and becoming sort of over routinized somehow well this is where we need friends and partners you know the role of friend partner is you know we're always in danger of losing perspective right and so just someone to point out not just that we've got spinach in our teeth but that we're on the edge of madness that it really doesn't matter that the forks are not aligned or that there's a mark on the wall or that, you know, supper's a bit late or something like this.

44:50Alain de Botton:Because I think, you know, this disease called OCD, obsessive compulsive disorder, you know, a lot of people will joke and go, I'm a bit OCD. Well, welcome to the club. I mean, it's a glorious club. I think with my psychotherapy hat on, the reason why people develop OCD is always the same. It's that they've experienced great lack of safety and a lack of love, if you can put it broadly. Love is the great insulator, literally creates a bubble, a home around somebody. If you surround, encase a person in love, they don't need so much casing of architecture. So it's the loveless who go to furniture shops as well, as it were, you know, childhood especially.

45:32So interesting.

45:33Alain de Botton:Yeah. Can you think of a way of setting up or constructing a home around the idea of love? um i mean you know if if you could do a translation exercise i mean what is love um you know what are the values associated with with interpersonal love it would be things like um listening being listened to um care gentleness consideration you know lots and lots of lovely adjectives and you could think okay well let's try and translate all those adjectives in the language of furnishings and design. You know, what is an empathetic space, et cetera? What is an empathetic window, et cetera? And this could sound very abstract, but it's not actually as abstract as all that.

46:17Alain de Botton:You know, I mean, there are fascinating exercises you can do. You can show somebody five drinking glasses and go, which one's conservative, which one's liberal, and which one's heading, you know, towards fascism or something, you know? And sometimes you can think, yeah, you can have a jolly good shot at that and you can get 20 people to perform that exercise and they'll more or less say the same thing so so there really are principles that emerge from from shapes and to create a loving space is to create a space which maximally you know heightens the those loving adjectives in in the language of design yeah um i want to ask you about living architecture and for those who are not familiar with it could you just briefly describe what that is so it's an organization that um has built a range of modern houses um which can be rented out for holidays so for viewers who know about something called the landmark trust it's like a landmark trust but in modern architecture and there are houses dotted around the uk and some wonderful names like john paulson like peter zumtor and others michael hopkins have designed the houses.

47:30Alain de Botton:And it's a chance to not just, as it were, be on holiday, but experience a space designed by people who care passionately about spaces and are trying to give you a certain sort of experience. That word experience, I think, is very apt. Why do you want people to be able to experience what you would think of as good modern architecture, rather than just look at it? Right. I mean, you know, there is something about experiencing space over a 24-hour period. Why do people love being in hotels more than, let's say, just being in a restaurant? The great thing about being in a hotel is that for a certain amount of time, you can shut the door and you can be in that space.

48:09Alain de Botton:You get undressed, you can sing a song, you can jump up and down on the bed. You can really make that space yours in a way you can't when you're merely passing through a cultural center or whatever. and my personal motivation for for the organization was was to you know allow as many people as possible to have that experience that they wouldn't otherwise be able to have we can go especially in a place like London you can go to lots and lots of very lovely spaces on the whole you can't spend the night there and with all the things that happen in the night you know it's quite lot of sort of magic when you fall asleep somewhere and when you wake up somewhere these are very intimate moments and our senses are very very heightened at those moments and so when when a space is interesting you you get an extra kick from it i think so you have built probably 10 or so houses i think in your life i've been involved in the building of been involved in the building of so you probably learned a few things not as many as i would have liked um i've learn how to work with architects yeah um how do you work with an architect really appreciate how tough it is for them to have a client they don't really want a client i mean they say they do but really they want to do it you know their way and and clients are terrible nuisance and the more you can just be honest about that and apologize all the time say i'm so sorry that i'm ruining your fun and saying those things you know they don't want they don't want an opinion so that the end of the day the construction industry is is really where it all happens you're you're in the hands of your builders.

49:46Alain de Botton:It's an odd kind of marriage. You know, most of the time you don't know who you're getting married to when you team up with a building firm. And there are some great ones, and there are a lot of really substandard ones, or ones who are so fragile because they're affected by the economy, etc., that they can't give you the guarantees that you need as a client to get a project properly off the ground. Because the decision to build a house, it seems to me, is a very optimistic act isn't it and yet the process somehow has a habit of grinding you down how do you hold on to that optimism you know someone like you has done it quite a few times how do you how do you keep going i mean you know kevin mcleod wouldn't be the legendary figure he is if the whole thing was easy it is clearly nightmarish and people love grand designs precisely for that contrast between the beautiful fantasy and the nightmarish journey towards that fantasy.

50:46Alain de Botton:And yeah, I mean, it's unfortunate, it shouldn't be, but it is slightly for the foolhardy and the passionate and the slightly unhinged. You know, there was a young writer that apparently went up to the French writer André Gide and said, should I become a writer? And this senior French literary figure when only if you have to and I think the same would probably hold true for architecture you know should you build a house well only if you have to um otherwise don't and by have to I really mean psychologically if it's you know if it's really hard for you not to and I think there are people up and down the country who are passionate and they do this slightly irrespective of sanity um probably driving everybody close to them mad but but yeah so it's a it's a passion project, I'd say.

51:34Alain de Botton:It shouldn't be. It's so sad that it has to be. After all, no one would think someone who chose their own clothes as a passionate, demented person. They just think we're just getting dressed. Somehow when it comes to the dressing of our domestic spaces, the economics, the procedures around it make it for the foolhardy. Have you got any advice about how you would go about coming up with a brief for a house if you are going to build one? Obviously, you've got to select your architect, and presumably you'd maybe meet with a few different ones and see who you got on well with. And to some extent, you're adopting what they do stylistically.

52:12But still, they're looking to you as the client to tell them what you really want. Having done that a few times, where do you start? What's the list? What do they get from you? And what would be your advice?

52:24Alain de Botton:Well, you know, there's that moment where Louis Kahn, the American architect, once held up a brick during a seminar. And he went, what does a brick want? and it was a sort of strange question like what on earth does that mean what a brick one brick doesn't want anything but yeah i think what he was pointing to is that certain materials but then also by extension certain spaces ask certain things of them so i think that you know very often architects but also clients design with spaces in mind so if you've got a property in lancashire that property might be asking for something uh if you've got a property in an urban location in portsmouth it might be asking something else so it just slightly depends what the environment is doing and is asking for.

53:04Alain de Botton:And it might pull you in one direction rather than another. So I think it's, look, it's an intuitive question. How do we decide what we want to eat? Sometimes we need a menu to look at. And we sort of, we think, you know, we open the fridge and you think, I don't know what I want to eat. But if someone showed you a menu, you think, oh, I know, I'm in a fish sort of mood, because the word fish has sort of triggered an acknowledgement. So, you know, if nothing's coming up spontaneously, obviously, one of the great pleasures is to look at other people's houses. And the internet's made this just amazing that there's so much that we can look at.

53:37Alain de Botton:And it could be everything from, you know, a 13th century castle to a, you know, Tuscan hilltop thing to a modernist apartment in New York, whatever it is. And just to look out for those moments when you think, yeah, that's it. There's something here that I'm envious of. Envy is quite a good guide to your suppressed desires. Every time someone shows you an environment and you think why have they got it and not me showing you that there's a bit of you lodged in somebody else's project and you should probably go and fish it out and copy it and get it get it back to you how many people have stayed in your living architecture projects do you reckon over the years a lot of people a lot of people i mean many many thousands many thousands many many thousands what's what would you say is the biggest thing that you've learned from the whole project i think the nicest thing is that on a good day people really do have a special time that they'll you know they'll they'll respond to their environment in exactly the ways in which those who constructed the space would have would have hoped for and they come back energized um these are houses where sometimes big decisions are made sometimes you need to go away from your home in order to rethink your life you know it's an odd thing but again tradition of monasticism was precisely that that you can't necessarily liberate yourself from certain thoughts unless you put yourself in a new environment and um sometimes you know a beautiful accomplished house can be the place where you rethink what you want from your career or the rest of your life or your relationship to others and i find those moments very moving evidence of that very moving um final question if someone listening to this or watching this feels somehow unsettled or restless at home yeah at the moment dissatisfied what would be your advice to them psychologically rather than practically do you think i mean like so many other you know psychological challenges to know that one's not alone that that however peculiar that feeling seems to be or however you know as often we don't take our our problems as seriously as we need to so you might think oh i'm just a bit dissatisfied with the color of the sofa actually we took that seriously what that means is like you know maybe you're not quite in your element anymore in this place that you thought was home and if you can learn to take that seriously um you can start to do something about it but until you do take it seriously it's stuck at the level of a joke or a you know an obsession um an unfair obsession so i think that our relationship to spaces are often signaling um how we're doing in our lives more broadly and there may come a time when we need to move home, as it were, or recreate a home in a different way, that the home that's kept us safe until now has run out of steam.

56:28Alain de Botton:And we need to do that very difficult but heroic and wonderful thing, which is to go out and create a new home for ourselves. Yeah, I completely agree with that. And I've sort of concluded that actually, it's okay if a home suits us for a particular life stage but it may well not be the next one you know i think we have a hard time accepting this in many areas of life we want every relationship to last forever but that's an unfair demand i mean think of our relationship to literature you can have a wonderful time with a book but if you were made to read that book all the time it would drive you mad you know we we realized that we needed to read that book at that time similar thing can accompany let's say our relationship to our friends, certain friends we may grow out of.

57:13Alain de Botton:They carried us to a certain place, we carried them to a certain place, and now that place has been reached and we go in different directions. Same is true of houses. We may need to say, you know, thank you. And sometimes people speak to rooms. It's quite a nice, sweet thing. People say goodbye to hotel rooms. Sometimes you might need to say goodbye to a home and say, thank you. Thank you for taking me here. But now I'm moving on. Well, on that note, thank you for having us here. Thank you so much. Fascinating. Thanks. Thanks very much for listening, folks. I've been interviewing people for about 25 years or so now, and I must admit I've never met anyone quite as articulate as Alain, so I very much hope you enjoyed that.

57:53Alain was kind enough to invite me into his home, of course, for this conversation, but he's very private, so we didn't record a house tour this time. However, if you do enjoy looking around other people's houses, you may be interested in our roster of video tours over on Patreon. So head to patreon.com slash homing with Matt to take a look at those. We've got some stellar guests coming up, film directors, chefs, fashion designers, and all sorts of other folks. So I'd encourage you to tap the follow button and subscribe to the show if you don't already do that. You can also watch the video versions of all of our podcasts on YouTube at Homing with Matt.

58:33This episode was produced by Podshop with music by Simeon Walker. thanks all and we'll be back again next week bye bye