Everyone has a hobby. Some even have several. Hobbies don't have to be lofty, noble or expensive. It can be as intimate as chiseling away at any matter in the back of reality, or as modest as the surreptitious collection of objects that no one else covets. A colleague of mine in São Paulo collects from sidewalks "dynxes" for opening cans - those little tongues with which one squirts out a piece of metal, in whose place a drinking hole is formed. Buddy says it's more than just a hobby: that someday he'll make art out of these thousands of "teges." Because a hobby is a portal to dreamland.
For example, the builder of landscapes that cut the rails of Piko railroads is the Creator of microworlds. He peeks into the windows of little houses and looks thoughtfully at the little lives of the human beings who inhabit them. He looks at the women wiping their hands in red aprons as they argue with their husbands, who have just returned from working on the railroad. He lays stretches of fresh grass on the mountainsides. He correlates train crossings and turning points in lives with the piety of painted figurines. I, too, have my hobby, and like any hobbyist, I happily devote long hours to it, during which I fall up to my ears in the trap, or perhaps rather, the fluffy cushion of fantasy. Well , I, please you, collect real estate, but (usually) on the sly. I have, as businessmen say, an extensive and diversified portfolio of plots of land, houses and apartments, in various countries. So much for imagination.
I put my interest into practice in several ways. The first is strictly virtual: I visit places only on my phone or computer screen. However, I do this according to a set of keys, because the fun is in taking reality deadly seriously. The primary key is the price threshold. I set up territories of interest in real estate browsers and assume various, usually low, prices. What the program "spits out" I throw through the first sieve, marking the "pile" of seemingly interesting offers. Only those with photos, preferably with information that allows me to find the object of my interest. In doing so, I analyze all the standard parameters that Professor Werner at WAPW taught me in his real estate valuation seminar. Location and a hundred times location! Is it far to the airport or train station? And is it necessary to drive to the store by car? Is it possible to walk to the nearest bar, where they give you Delta coffee for two euros and you can draw on hard napkins? But most of all, I'm interested in the essence of the place. Does it look like it has good energy and people will live well there? Or has someone been jammed in this stone Tuscan house, and now its ectoplasmic presence is causing this casa colonica to be for sale at a price for which we won't buy a dog kennel in Warsaw? And if the plot is sloping, what's in the ground there? Would it be necessary to pile? On such occasions, I even go so far as to bother real estate agents, plucking my best Italian, Spanish, Portuguese or French from my brain to write in the middle of the night: "Dear Madam, has a geotechnical analysis been done for the plot?". I have no qualms: even though I know perfectly well that the plot will never be bought, I torment the poor creature in the name of fulfilling my selfish fantasy. The evil me.
On top of that, I am, to invoke the term used by Prof. Werner, an amateur. To the uninitiated, I explain: an amateur is someone whose eyes light up at something that the rest of the population finds too strange or unworthy of attention. In a word: I'm a fantasist and a romantic, although I do my best to come off as a ruthless pragmatist in my own (and others'!) eyes. What turns me on the most are difficult houses and apartments with potential, that is, premises too small, too rumpled, too low, too high and in a non-obvious neighborhood. A narrow house with a secret back exit leading between neighbors' gardens to a wicket hidden in ivy, like Jean Valjean's house from "Les Miserables." The undercover officers come after me, nudge the string with the bell with my foot, and I then skulk away in a frock coat and with a cane, which has a saber hidden, the aforementioned wicket. Haha, and that's how much they saw me! Or such a small hut docked to a half-ruined medieval tower on the edge of an Apennine precipice, like from the illustrations to de Amicis' "The Heart", at which I drenched myself with shedding tears, being a child. When it comes to the nature of a plot of land, or any structure built by the hand of man, passions arise that make me begin to better understand the words of the professor, usually dressed in a three-piece dark suit, who smilingly convinced us in the fourth year that "real estate is all about psychology." Here acutely my psychology, because anyone who looks into my dream portfolio will immediately have a good idea of my mental afflictions.
The second, even more interesting way of "collecting" properties is to actually visit them. I do this in several ways. The most interesting is to stop the car at a sign that says "For Sale" in the land where I happen to be on vacation. My own children tell friends and family that I keep "buying" lots. So I drag my indulgent family into macchia bushes, into abandoned olive groves and between native oak trees. I huddle around the neglected farms and parsonages. Things are no different in my daily life: whenever the opportunity arises, I make appointments with agents and visit abstract properties, and then spend weeks figuring out how to redesign the too-small interior of a Gomulka studio apartment to accommodate a program for a family of four. My notebooks have been filled with sketches of such apartments and houses for decades.
It would be my hobby a shameless waste of my time and that of others if it weren't for the fact that every now and then, however, I buy something. Not infrequently "on a nut" and under the influence of an internal struggle between the pragmatist (and paranoid) and the fantasist sitting inside me. Even as I write these words, I am sitting in the apartment I fell in love with during a nighttime virtual wander one hot August night. I wrote to the agent at the time, and she replied that I should absolutely and as soon as possible see this wonderful opportunity. And since she made the appointment on a Sunday and made it clear that the owners were in dire need of money and that it was urgent, overnight I became the happy owner of a property in a neighborhood I would never have dreamed of. In addition, the premises have an address different from the rest of the premises on the staircase, making it impossible for the district manager, couriers and first-time visitors to come here. On top of that, there is a hatch in the floor of the apartment to the basement, with no small like to Dexter's laboratory, covered by a carpet on a daily basis. The old professor was right: "real estate is psychology. And a mirror."
more: A&B 1/2025 - TREE IN ARCHITECTURE,
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