Gameplay: Or How Your Inner Animal Could Help Shape Your Perfect Habitat
Choose from these eight Animal Habitats, the type of landscapes, scents, and textures, you would feel most acclimated to: Desert, Ocean, Rainforest, Arctic, Forest, Wetlands, Grasslands, Mountains.
Nomadic homes around the world are documented in this new book from Taschen by Philip Jodidio. Ecocapsule: courtesy of Ecocapsule Holding.
As the island became dotted with townsites and cattle were introduced, the last of the mustangs on Mustang Island disappeared in the late 1800s.
Think about the things that you value in your present or future habitat:
What brings you joy and belonging?
What makes you return home with pleasure? What makes you smile when you wake up?
What scents and experiences evoke deep emotions or nostalgia?
Are there things and scents that make you cry when you find them elsewhere? For one, the scent of clean sheets drying in the wind. For someone else, the scones baked for weekend brunches…
Now, let your home converse with your inner animal.
Describe your sensory needs, daily pleasures, and sacred rituals. Share what ideally surrounds your house, and what excites you every day. Define the materials you want your house made off in your best world.
Think of it with notions of ethics and sustainability in energy use.
Here comes the bear. Bears adore shade, warmth, and chocolate truffles. Are you a brown bear, earthy and rooted, hibernating at length until forced out to hunt – suddenly frantic and insatiable, gathering treasures with a careful eye and fearless love for accumulation? Your pleasure is retreating to comfy couches surrounded by fluffy cushions in a dimly lit space, with oblique lights and baroque curtains. Urban bears prefer dens with well-crafted entertainment, a home movie setup, an industrial kitchen. Their homes are hidden from the street, accessed by a single entrance to deter unexpected visitors, and shielded by majestic trees.
Bears enjoy theatrical venues, wrapping themselves in crimson seats for immersive storytelling, with a collection of Alain Ducasse's Assorted Truffles at reach. They sleep in the morning, skip breakfast, indulge in lavish dinners, and are most effective at night.
Treehouses in Portugal to spend the night.
Join the game!
Which animal are you?
Or which animal[s] are you? Build your own blend of mythical creatures! Are you like Maria, part-hummingbird, part-deer? If so, you love homes suspended on hills to feel the wind, flooded with sunlight, quiet, warm, small and neat.Maria, 21, adores mornings and smaller homes for their calming effect. She grew up in a sprawling house with her mother, grandparents, great aunt, and four dogs. "The house was always a lively mess and felt too big for me. I realize I’m more agitated in big spaces". Her grandmother, the architect, had an aesthete eye for style, collecting paintings and clothing. She filled up the space. In homes passed from generation to generation, one’s accumulated memories might feel like a heavy burden for some and a cherished comfort for others.
House in Nakano City by Buttondesign, 2019, via archdaily.com
Architect-designed house in the Catskills, a mountainous region northwest of New York City.
Our homes indeed harbor intricate alchemies. They encompass our metaphysical existence—our body, mind, and soul—in one space, intertwined with our mental projections, at times conflicting emotions, desires and deceptions, our spiritual essence, and bodily sensations of comfort and discomfort. Multiply that by each inhabitant, and you have a dense tangle of DNA, potential drama, and sticky love! For some, home is a sanctuary where solitude or togetherness brings a sense of recluse peace and energy renewal. For others, home is a theater stage, or a labyrinth of rooms, shared with many family members. These homes are like the belly of the whale, safe wide spaces filled with chaos and interruptions.
Ana, a mother of four and grandmother twice over, has a house always welcoming to her grown-up kids, but sometimes she finds herself needing to carve out "me-time" to focus on her startup supporting women’ well-being. Other homes cater to those with similar needs, such as co-working spaces, university dormitories, or elderly homes. Other homes are missing; homes in absence, taken away, leaving a body homeless to the harshness of the street; unprotected, exposed, sleepless.
For some, a house is a space for welcoming others, a sedentary and well-anchored architecture meant for more than just oneself. For others, solace is found in transient spaces, with wings always ready to deploy—stability found in movement. What kind of creature[s] are you?
What sets of values are rooted in your homes, no matter where they are?
What defines you at your core in your habitat? For example, how close or distant do you wish to be from nature and humankind?
In the animal kingdom, Jerome is a sparrow.
He migrates once a year from May to October, from his father’s inherited mansion in France, to the converted sheepfold he spent twenty years building stones by stones in the Cévennes Mountains of Southern France –still undetected by Google. The region served as hideaway of the French resistance and the hippy communes. Today, rare hikers and geologists traverse his perch.
Jerome’s father was his polar opposite. He wore light suits, drove a white Porsche, was a Vogue subscriber, a bottle at the local Maxim’s. He categorically refused to visit the sheepfold. He just couldn’t connect the dots.
Sheepfold in the Cévennes Mountains of Southern France – dandyvagabonds.com
Courtesy of Susan C. Morse / deerassociation.com
What is your vital space?
Are you resilient to constrained architectures in dense cities, or do you yearn for the open horizon? Are you an adaptable half-bird, half-deer, drawn to altitude, shade, and the offerings of the forest? Or are you a grounded creature, constructing a tiny house in a tree trunk to stash away reserves?
Do you sleep with your nose tucked under your arm for warmth, like a deer curling its nose under its hind leg in the cold?
Or are you like a bird, perfectly designed to slice through winds in the dramatic wetlands of Scotland, gaining speed as the wind rushes beneath your wings, akin to fearless surfers conquering shapeless immensities? Are you a domesticated animal or an untamable mustang, roaming freely through the "Nevadas," oblivious to borders and orders, never feeling the need to return home? Were you the child who always felt like they were missing out on the grand scale of the universe, eager to run away from home after dropping a heavy backpack full of schoolbooks that felt like stones?
If so, you might be the same Anton who now lives and works from his campervan perched on a cliff just outside of Vila do Bispo, a few miles from Sagres, a surf haven at the end of the world Portugal. Sitting barefoot on the steps of his van next to his HVMH Birkenstocks, he scrolls through Google for the latest trends in glamping kits. His marketing company is registered in Miami, "because it was the best offer on the market," while his birthplace is somewhere in Tyrol, Germany.
Campervan / office near Praia do Castelejo, Algarves, Portugal – dandyvagabonds.com
Imagine if we could design a housing platform based on our hybrid animal spirit. We could express everything evoked on the above. We could develop a comprehensive understanding of how we wish to feel in a place and what values are important to us. This digital space would transcend the current real estate platforms which primarily focus on geography, floorplan size, and budget, with lengthy descriptions of kitchen boards. This alternative space would feed a database of experiences, allowing us to share our past journeys and how they inform our current housing search. Along with our budgets, our emotional and intellectual preferences could shape the future of our habitats through an open grid of questions.
What turns you on? And puts you down?
Is it a top-of-the-line industrial kitchen with plenty of drawers, always impeccably clean like a surgical operating room, ready to whip up sophisticated meals from your extensive cookbook collection? Or do you find joy in simplicity, creating fresh salads and veggie-based meals with just two electric burners reminiscent of your student days?
Is your ideal bathtub more like a spacious jacuzzi to scrub your back without bumping your elbow on hard tiles?
Or an antique bathtub throning in the center of a converted warehouse as in a Peter Greenaway movie? Or what about a sleek glassless shower carved from cement or stone, easy to enter and exit without the need for perpetually damp rugs? And isn’t it true that most shared housing suffer the sponge left in the sink? What creeps you in sharing housing? So few literacies are documenting that field alone.
In May 2022, Airbnb introduced Airbnb Categories alongside 'New' and 'Trending’.
They added categories like 'Hanok' (traditional Korean homes made of natural materials), 'Top of the World' (locations around 10,000 feet above sea level with stunning views), and 'Play' for listings featuring basketball courts, game rooms, trampolines, water slides... Just as bears adapt their shelters to different seasons using roots, rock crevices or hollow trees, imagine being able to adjust insulation and energy-saving techniques based on the seasons, much like packing and storing winter clothing. Through quizzes, interactive sketches, and metaphors, we could better understand our instinctive and cerebral responses to familiar and unfamiliar environments.
‘Golden dreamers’, culprits or scapegoats?
The sharing economy model for housing is only in its infancy.
Platforms like Airbnb have reshaped entire buildings into transient accommodations for just fifteen years. This disruption has been significant in traditionally slow-moving housing and hospitality reforms, breaking down barriers to hosting and staying with strangers.
Airbnb is being implicated in Portugal's housing crisis. So is the influx of expats seeking tax havens and the digital nomads. Other would say that the housing shortage was the issue. Reis Campos, president of the Portuguese Confederation of Construction and Real Estate (CPCI), stresses the need for more construction and renovation to establish a robust rental market. This requires consistent stimulus for private investment. [Source: TPN]
Landscape architects McGregor Coxall has won a competition to design a wetland sanctuary in Tianjin, offering migrating birds a stopover to fatten up and breed via Deezen.
Praia da Cordoama near Vila do Bispo, Portugal – dandyvagabonds.com
Markets are like ebbs and flows. They are cyclical. And housing crashes bring the best countercultural alternatives.
In the early 1990s, before the term "Sharing Economy" was coined, its principles were already evident in London. Despite economic turmoil, a unique culture emerged among the youth. For British boys sporting Portobello secondhand clothes and spiky hairstyles, being broke had a certain swagger. And you could easily find three college best friends who have managed to buy an entire Victorian house in Elephant & Castle. Each friend was allocated a floor, and they shared the basement kitchen. Innovative mortgage schemes for first-time buyers helped ease this reshaping of traditional housing layouts to suit new generations’ needs.
Hopes and dreams fuel migrations.
Are we so different for birds?
Yesterday's #goldenvisa winners have since built thriving businesses in the Algarve. Digital nomads now have settled in Lisbon are pioneering housing-swap apps for their community.
From Ericeira to Peniche, a migration of nature lovers from Northern countries fosters sustainable ocean-side lifestyles. In Baleal, people speak a blend of languages, German, American, Dutch, or French, reminiscent of the Scandinavian migration to Venice Beach in the 1980s.
And Lisbon's housing price surge has spurred development in Greater Lisbon, with booming new projects on the South Bank, from Barreiro to Seixal, and a constructive competition among historical towns for renovations. No doubt, these projects change the demographic make-up of a region and might contribute its social vitality.
KazaSwap, may still be in prototype stage, but it might shake up the rental market and redefine the concept of money. The app refines the old-school nomadic swap idea with intuitive UX design and practical features like sliding calendars. Over 4000 active nomad users already swapping within an existing Kaza WhatsApp Group, are the testers of platform.
The project demonstrates the need to cater to diverse lifestyles and audiences across expanded geographies. This shift towards hybrid lifestyles blurs the lines between work and leisure, architecture and nature. It challenges the traditional notion of a sedentary house for life, paving the way for more inclusive housing solutions where lineage no longer defines ownership.
So, what’s for tomorrow? Will we still browse through endless digital catalogues of lifeless houses with factual descriptive of the fully equipped kitchen, and little said about how these places speak to us or not?
Or will our persona be data mined so to detect that a solar-panel equipped treehouse with an AL attached [short term accommodation license], is what would allow short-leases to other nomads who might wish to experience a change of landscape and culture?
The new luxury? Glamping, a portmanteau of ‘glamorous’ and ‘camping’. More: The Importance of Branding in the World of Glamping by Brian Searl on medium | Feb 10, 2024
Mafra, Portugal, sunbathing by dandyvagabonds.com
Read the story of the self-entrepreneur buyer who bought a ruin in Estremoz, and will now life / host / work from the feet of the castle.
Our pursuit of the "ideal home" is an ongoing journey marked by expectations, adaptation, and transformation. The weight of homes is profound, reflected in the often arduous and traumatic procedures involved in their acquisition and maintenance. Consider the dichotomy of positive and negative associations with "home" – from symbols of warmth and comfort to burdens of hoarding and foreclosure. These processes can be lengthy and daunting, particularly as more people embrace frequent relocations driven by career opportunities and lifestyle changes.
Yet, despite this evolving landscape, the sale of homes often resembles scenes from "Salesman" (1969), where salesmen peddle heavy bibles to America's lower middle-class. Credit: Janus Films.
Then there's the complex dynamics of cohabitation, where individuals must navigate the intricate interplay of emotions and aspirations within shared spaces. Houses themselves take on a life of their own, shifting between functional efficiency and temperamental whimsy.
We constantly seek, rearrange, expand, reduce, and ultimately depart from these spaces. Whether we rent, buy, sell, or invest in houses, they serve as shelters for our protection, canvases for our imagination, and symbols of our permanence. They absorb our dreams, memories, and secrets, shaping their own realities in the process.
With remote work on the rise, we're rediscovering the ancient concept of productive houses, the honeycomb principle of the farmhouse or the townhouse with its barber shop underneath.
Drawing inspiration from the animal kingdom, we could learn valuable lessons in diversity, lifestyle planning, and survival strategies. We could glean practical ideas from our furry and feathered friends, embracing what makes us uniquely human. Even corporations like IBM are rethinking their internal organization, drawing parallels to the collaborative structure of a honeycomb.
Are you a restless soul, constantly seeking freedom from sedentary life? Perhaps you're the one who leaves the house in case of separation? Or maybe you fight to preserve your family's history within its walls? In our quest for belonging, we yearn for tribes and landscapes untouched by the constraints of conventional architecture. In this vision, homes transcend their physical form to become ecosystems tailored to individuals, fostering connectivity, collaboration, and reflecting the values and aspirations of their inhabitants.
Book: Nomads: Life on the move
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