Living Spaces

A hotel is a blank slate. It understands that this is not where your life will happen. It exists for you to rest. To talk. To plan. To sleep. It is a refuge when needed, characterized by a specific emptiness that allows the guest to mold it around themselves. You can tug at the corners of a hotel room, find a specific number of beds, find one with a kitchenette or a mini fridge or neither. Pull it around you like a jacket you borrow from someone else.

A house is a living thing. It is already fit to someone or someones. It exists to welcome back. To comfort. To remind. It is always a refuge. Houses are tailored- they have spaces cleared for shoes, trimming here and there to accommodate changes in lifestyle. You cannot pull a house around you; it fits itself to you. It is a blanket with a patchwork of memories.

Neither one is really better than the other. They fit different needs and times. Maybe a hotel can become a house to some, after a long stay, when the nightstand becomes a laundry hamper and you know what setting to use on the coffee machine. Maybe a house can be a hotel, unfamiliar and blank when you're not accustomed to how the door to the bathroom shuts or the noise the window makes when you open it.

Maybe we live in a world where these things are not set anymore. Where money or business dictates where we sleep. Where we lay ourselves to rest. Where we are most comfortable.

Maybe a home or a hotel aren't places. Maybe they are states of being and mind and maybe that is the difference. Maybe that's why when we ask are you at home? we don't mean to ask if you are physically at your place of residence.

We mean, how do you feel?