What Children Notice About Houses That Grown Ups Don’t

On atmosphere, mess, and what makes a home

From his very first visit, Fred has referred to our new house simply as “The Messy House.”

And it’s hard to argue with him.

At the moment, the house, and the garden surrounding it, is extremely messy.

There are buckets catching drips, collapsing ceilings, piles of ancient wiring and pipework, birds’ nests at the bottom of almost every chimney, builders’ tea mugs balanced on windowsills, and at least a year’s worth of dust and dirt covering every surface.

Outside, the garden, which was - if we’re being very generous - a romantic wilderness when we bought the house, has now endured eight months of clearing and cutting back, plus a long winter, and looks much worse.

At a glance, there is currently nothing much romantic about it at all, other than the vision of what it will become, which for now just lives inside our heads.

And still, Fred absolutely loves it there.

He runs through the house at full speed as though he has known it forever.

He notices things I walk past entirely.

A strange little hatch in the wall: open, shut, open, shut, as if he’s testing the hinges.

The sound one door makes compared to another.

The fact that one room echoes more than the others.

The tiny pink mushrooms growing in the corner of the attic room.

Last time we were there, he wanted to stay upstairs because he liked the sound of the rain hitting the roof above him.

He notices where the house feels interesting.

Children experience houses completely differently to grown-ups.

Grown-ups walk into a house and immediately begin assessing it. Most recently, for us, that has meant figuring out the layout of the kitchen, choosing fireplace surrounds and deciding where to add built-in storage.

Children notice whether there’s enough room to run with arms outstretched.

Somewhere good to hide.

Whether there’s a window low enough to press your face against.

They notice atmosphere before appearance, which I think is probably the better way round.

Maybe because they’re physically smaller and closer to the world, they notice sensory things we adults tend to become immune to.

Watching shadows move across the floor.

The smell inside an old cupboard.

A draught under a door.

The particular creak of a stair: up, down, up, down, up, down.

I’ve noticed that when we visit, Fred asks almost no questions.

He just absorbs the place.

Meanwhile, all Will and I seem to do is ask questions; this week about damp-proofing and whether we can justify repointing the whole house at once.

Fred just wants to know whether the bats sleep in the roof during the daytime.

I think as adults we often end up designing houses around how life looks, when really we should be designing around how life feels.

Especially now, when so much of what we consume online presents homes as finished products. It’s easy to fall into the trap of making houses look the way we think they should, or worse, confusing our own taste with something we’ve seen a hundred times on Instagram.

Something i’ve written about previously and that I keep coming back to, is that with this house is the atmosphere already exists. Even now, before the renovation.

The feeling is already there, albeit under lots of layers of old gloss paint and dust.

So now the penny has dropped; what we’re actually trying to do with the renovation is not create atmosphere from scratch, but bring it back to the surface again.

And I think children are often the first to recognise it.

The homes I remember most vividly from my own childhood are not the most beautiful ones. Or maybe they were, I can’t remember. But what I do remember is the feeling of them.

How relaxed and welcome I felt.

A crowded kitchen with lots of chatter.

Eating breakfast with the kitchen door flung open in the summer, sunshine pouring in.

Hiding in a warm airing cupboard and swapping secrets.

And that’s what I want this house to become for our children. Not impressive or pristine, just deeply familiar and comfortable. A place where muddy boots and wet coats and crayons and noise and friends, big and small, are all welcome and fit comfortably.

A house that feels lived in, and where children are allowed to exist fully, messily.

Maybe children understand something we gradually forget: homes are not remembered for their perfection. They’re remembered for how it felt to be small inside them.

What’s a completely ordinary detail from a childhood home you still remember?