Lapping up luxury

I’m not one for thinking that there’s something great about luxury homes. They always seem to me to require an awful lot of work to keep them looking brand spanking. It’s the same with those houses in Home and Garden type magazines. They never looked lived in. You try and match up the happy couple standing smiling in the photo with the home that’s splashed across the pages, and you think: who does all the work? Who wipes all these glass surfaces and keeps them shiny? Where are the books these people read? Where are the children’s toys, or the grandchildren’s toys? Everything seems hidden away as though any minute someone from Location, Location was going to appear and film the whole thing.

I don’t mind living in a luxury home for a week or so. That’s about as long as I can stand in terms of tripping carefully around the various ornaments that we know are next to priceless, or avoiding soiling the rugs, or sitting too hard on a chair, or scratching the glass tabletop, or knocking one of the valuable pictures off the wall.

I’m sure real people live in luxury homes. And no doubt they have several servants running after them cleaning up. But keeping a luxury home luxurious seems to me to be a task beyond the necessary.

In the eye of the beholder

While we were on the Continent, we had the experience of seeing many luxury homes; mostly from the outside. On the bus tour we took in Hamburg, we went around streets where the homes had once had gardens rolling down to the water. In Barcelona we stayed in what was basically a luxury apartment – we were scared to touch anything much in case we broke something.

And in Luxembourg we stayed in what I would class as a luxury home – except that the people living there don’t see it as such.

Up to a point, luxury is in the eye of the beholder. The homes that the National Trust now administer in England are certainly luxurious, but where’s the luxury in having to have dozens of servants to keep the place clean? Even if you do pay them a pittance.

It’s the same with the house in Luxembourg: it’s so large it’s too much for the owners, and they have to get someone in to clean.

It rather takes the edge off the luxury, to my way of thinking, if you have to employ someone to clean up after you. Think I’ll stick with the home I’ve got - which we can manage to keep up by ourselves.

Lap of Luxury

After visiting so many stately mansions and large abodes on our travels around the UK, you’d think we’d have got an idea what it means to have a luxury home. But it seems we’re not really aware of what’s current.
A modern luxury home is expected to have all sorts of things included that once upon a time would barely be dreamed of. Many of them are ‘smart’ houses. They’re equipped with high-tech computers that monitor and control all manner of features in the house. Remember when Tom Cruise goes into his apartment in the film Minority Report and speaks to the lights? That’s just a very simple example. The computers in smart houses sort out not just the lighting, but the heating, the cooling, and the security. (Just don’t let there be a power cut - although no doubt many of these houses have their own generators as well.)
Modern luxury homes are also made of eco-friendly building materials, and incorporate a large number of features that make them green in the very best sense. (If we can just get computers to go green we’ll be really making progress!)
And then of course, the humans in these ultra-clever homes expect to be looked after - pampered even - by their homes. Spa pools, whirlpools, saunas, heated marble floors and towel bars are the sort of things that will keep the soft as soft humans happy. And for the woman - or her maid, more likely - the kitchens in these homes are aimed at the gourmet cook. They’re expansive (the kitchens, not the cooks) and they have smart appliances. That ‘smart’ word again. What does it mean when it comes to kitchens?
Because these luxury homes are likely to be networked electronically, kitchen items, from stoves to fridges may start ‘talking’ to each other. And may even ignore the humans!