“208 square meters… Exterior… Five bedrooms… Three bathrooms… Office, living room, dining room… Garage… 24-hour concierge… More than one million euros. How are you staying? I see, you have become like a motorcycle.” The quote is from an article by writer Isaac Rosa for Diario.es where he tells of his addiction – long and chronic, it has lasted 15 years – of looking at apartments that he cannot afford.
In an interview, Sofia Coppola was asked what she did to relax: “I have a glass of wine while I do real estate porn in the pages of The New York Times,” she answered without any shame.
I have a friend who usually gets around the stress of her visa at the end of the month by looking at villas worth more than a million euros on the Mediterranean coast on Idealista. Is she going to move from the autonomous community? Not at all, but she likes to fantasize about another life and, above all, another checking account. Real estate porn (finding relief by looking at very high-end houses that one can never afford) is a democratic and aspirational phenomenon that is above success and social classes.
Precisely, a survey by the Idealista portal has put figures on the state of affairs in Spain. A survey among its users ensures that 8 out of 10 have used its services to “fantasize about luxury homes with the sole objective of browsing and relaxing.” The majority of those surveyed (84%) admit to doing it once a week, but there are 18% who get hooked on real estate porn several times a day. The houses that trigger fantasies are, according to Idealista, designer urban penthouses (26%), mansions with swimming pools (22%), villas on the coast (22%) and farmhouses with huge plots of land (16%).
While admiring luminous penthouses worth three million euros, life experiences an upgrade – like when at the last minute you are seated in the business cabin with a tourist class ticket, and you feel like you were chosen by the gods. Suddenly we have plenty of space, we have a huge dressing room, we spend the afternoon in a large garden, we are happy watching the sunsets from the terrace, and our problems disappear when we settle into an open-plan living room with three nude sofas, all Italian and none of them Stuck to the wall.
Anxiety and blood pressure are reduced. Normal. Housing projection generates well-being and is cheap, almost free if we discount the internet connection. For a few hours we not only fantasize about other lives, but we settle into them for a few days.
“It’s addictive – acknowledges Pablo López, from Casa Josephine Studio –, we not only look at unattainable houses to live in, but also land on which to build. It is a simple form of escapist fiction that allows us to imagine a life in which everything is as perfect as the setting, but I do not think it is a sterile activity, it helps us define our ideal of beauty and is a way of educating taste. .
We have reached the paroxysm of this collective addiction with the real estate reality shows that the platforms program for us, where the agents – so handsome that they seem to have passed four castings to sell a flat – tell us their difficulties in pleasing the expectations of the ultra-rich and They neatly show the mansions that their clients discard. They also show us their miseries and dramas. And we must admit, we love to think that the rich also cry, even if they do it in a Lamborghini or from a villa in Tuscany.
Our unhealthy curiosity is also satisfied when we fantasize that if we had that large mansion we would have furnished it better, we would not have put in that lamp and, of course, we would have removed those curtains. Real estate reality shows teach us that in the mansions of the ultra-rich, you don’t take risks and go for the generic. With a million euros they will cover their kitchen with the ugliest marble, they will invest in the blue dog by Jeff Koons or the Togo sofa by Ligne Roset. We are poor but we have good taste, that kind of consolation prize suits us so well!
The platforms produce series that show us every last bathroom in famous people’s homes. We know everything about Georgina’s chalet and Kendall Jenner’s mansion, our pupils are saturated with infinity pools and free-standing bathtubs. We could also call it wealth porn, and in that, Truman Capote was an unsurpassed master, who would probably say that houses are an ambiguous indicator of money, that you have to look at other things. His good eye led him to achieve maximum sociological skill and to formulate his masterful sentence: “what distinguishes the truly rich from the simply rich is the size of their vegetables: the very rich always serve tiny carrots and microscopic peas.” Looking at those houses, Capote would say with a start: “Bah, you can pay for the marble kitchen islands in installments.”