The Soul Of A House

‘I like to think of houses as having a soul. This is something I often speak of with our clients, particularly on entering - for the first time - what will ultimately become their family home.’

Opening the door, pushing aside unopened mail on the floor, passing the bare-bulbed pendant, the splitting wallpaper like rings on a tree reveal other layers from other times, the markings of where there was once a sofa, wall hanging, circular ring from a candle on the mantelpiece. The air is stale with a faint cocktail of smells that change from room to room - mixing in varying measure carpet, linoleum with the settling in of dust, damp and decay. On a warm day the presence is stronger than when it’s cold. Higher temperatures have the effect of exciting more odour-releasing molecules into the air and into your nose.

You step on a raised Victorian floorboard below, creaking muffled under the carpet as you walk through the bedroom door. Something that was bothersome for so many years but no one quite got ‘round to repairing. “I’ll do it tomorrow,” he so often said. There are signs of both deep occupation and the flurry of departure made clear by things left behind - a spare kitchen chair, a few unrecognisable Penguin titles of fiction from the 1970’s, a stack of faded snapshots from a wedding, a decorative gilded mirror leaning against the wall, a box of random parts and pieces, finding themselves together as they had nowhere else obvious to go. These things, unwanted, forgotten or deliberately left behind, with no space left in the van.