Property pleasure, property porn

My current pleasure (or vice, if you will) is viewing YouTube films presenting property for sale in different parts of Europe. The property has to be fairly cheap. I find no joy in viewing anything that is impossibly out of my reach. No multi-million euro, purpose-built holiday villas in Marbella (with swimming pool and gangster neighbours included). I know its not going to happen, but I have to be able to feel that, with a bit of effort, a bit of luck, I might be able to buy this three room terraced house in Abruzzo. Or this cottage in a quiet village between Nantes and Rennes. Or take on this apartment with attached cafe (closed now for 10 years) in central Portugal.

The last few months, whenever I feel the urge, I tell Mrs SC that “I’m just going to visit Bulgaria”, or wherever. And then I settle down with a couple of good videos and dream away.

Property dreams

What I dream about is being in this place or that. This house, for example (but not the one above), with three bedrooms, a living room and an attic “with a sound roof and solid beams of oak” or eucalyptus. It has an “outdoor kitchen with a real bread oven” and an “adega with barrels for your own wine”. I dream of it newly decorated and kitted out with well-stocked bookshelves, my writing desk in front of the window looking out over the river valley as the sun rises. Or sitting out on the sun terrace in the evening, a glass of wine to hand, writing up my daily diary as the sun sinks behind the distant mountains.

It’s a dream, a fantasy, I know, but it’s a cheap pleasure. Even cheaper than the prices on the properties I’m looking at, because I’m not actually going to spend €50,000 on a “farm building conversion”.

If I were 30 years younger, perhaps it wouldn’t be just a dream, but I wonder how it would work out. One of the video presenters is a Brit in Bulgaria. It looks like he and his family have been travelling there for several years during their holidays, working to repair an old farmhouse. The place is a building site, but he talks about his plans for each of the rooms. He can still see it in his mind’s eye, the vision he started out with. I’m glad for him, because if a property I’d bought several years before was still in the same state he’s achieved with all his work, I think my dream would have long evaporated. Rather than making videos about it, I’d be curled in a dark corner, personifying despair.

Renovating and rebuilding

Another pleasure is viewing videos of people renovating and rebuilding. I’m following Laura Kampf in Köln in her upbeat struggles to rescue a 120 year old town house. The things she has contended with are a catalogue of disasters; from rot and asbestos, to rising damp and colonies of ants in the beams. She’s been working on it (fortunately with help) for a year and a half now. She’s replaced walls and floors, reconstructed the roof and added proper windows. (The windows were sourced from Sweden. It seems Swedish windows open differently – in a better way – than German ones.)

It’s also very enjoyable to see timelapse films of people working full-time over months or even years to restore old buildings. Without actually raising finger, I can imagine myself doing … whatever it is they’re doing. Spray cleaning the old rendering off the stones of an Italian barn. Re-designing a little Scottish workshop to make a living space and a studio. Printing repeating patterns on plain wallpaper to achieve a fin de siècle look in a French chateau.

With the property videos, I’ve discovered I don’t just want film of the rooms in the building and the garden or land around. I really appreciate the guiding voice of the film maker or the estate agent. The pointing fingers: “the property stretchs down there as far as the walnut tree, then along that line of bushes to the river”. Best of all are the films with a couple, one behind the camera and one guiding, where there is a bit of back and forth. My current favourite combination comes from central Portugal. (Bom dia, Paola. Bom dia, Nick. And Bom dia Sarah, Nick’s partner, who hovers in the background of some of the videos.)

Story settings

Viewing these property videos isn’t simply food for daydreams. They could be settings for stories, or settings for characters wanting to be given a voice. They could be crime scenes. Some houses have clearly been staged for the video they appear in. Some are empty, abandoned even. (Look, there’s a swallows’ nest up in one corner! And is that a bat trying to get some sleep, hanging in the wood cellar?) Some, apparently, have been caught in use, the owners absent, perhaps only temporarily. They have left a pair of trousers on a bed, a rug on a recliner, bottles of shampoo in the shower. Or there are the rooms that have been used for storage with old matresses, bulging cardboard boxes, drifts of clothes, broken shelves and empty picture frames.

I learn about things that may be everyday in southern Europe, but are completely foreign to my experience. Things I’d probably never think of if I didn’t see them caught on film. The infinite labour that must have gone, long ago, into constructing the terraced fields that one farm after another can boast across Portugal and Italy. The water mines of Portugal – tunnels dug through sold rock to lead essential water to the fields from streams underground. The summer kitchens, built outdoors so the houses don’t overheat from baking and roasting in the summer months. The outdoor stairs so common in rural Bulgaria that the guide remarks with surprise on an indoor staircase in one rather grand ruin.

Morality

I wonder about the displacement of impoverished locals by wealthy foreign incomers. I think of the local authorities in Wales and the Balearic islands who are trying to restrict property sales to foreigners. There is certainly a concern about this is Lisbon, I read. But in most of the places where I’m viewing videos from it seems rather as though local authorities are welcoming. Population decline in central Portugal, in rural Italy, in Bulgaria puts the authorities in jeopardy. They want incomers, tax payers, employers, maybe entrepreneurs. And if the incomers have families, so much the better.

Knowing this makes me feel less irresponsible, and more so. Less because I don’t feel like I’m supporting something morally questionable; more because, obviously, I’m just getting my fix from these films without giving anything back.

So, how to give something back? Below are links to the different YouTube channels I’ve referenced in this post. Gentle reader, maybe you will be encouraged to look? Maybe you will be better placed than me to act on your dreams and buy a property? If you do, and you have a sun terrace with a view, invite me to stay and I’ll happily sit there to write my diary!

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Links (more or less in the order they are mentioned above)

• Abruzzio (OneStopAbruzzo)
• Brittany (LBV Immo)
• Central Portugal (Destino Portugal)
• Bulgaria (Our Derelict Dream)
• Laura Kampf (Rescuing a 120 year old house)
• Italian stone barn restoration (Raising Voyagers)
• Scottish workshop to tiny house (George Dunnet)
• How to Renovate a Chateau (without killing your partner)

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