Dear Laretta,

On the inside-ouside space

On the inside-ouside space

I was sitting with a tea in hand in the afternoon sun today. Ella was out and about. Ylva, the old Pointer was unsure as to whether it was better to stay there with me on the cold stone of the terrace or get back on the couch. It was warmer there that inside the house, which always spurs in me a tiny hatred towards uninsulated stone walls, and so I thought of you:) For we are here going through the same sun-hunger as we where years ago with you, in the chestnut grove. Though I must admit, it’s not only the walls’ fault.

I’m not sure if you remember the positioning of the house we live in here. It used to be three large stone walls on the west side of the castle. They had those made into a house about 10 years ago, no architect involved. I’m not arguing against self-built, you know me! What I am arguing against is sloppy work from under-qualified handymen. But let’s not dwell on that.

The house sits west-facing, as I said, and gets beautiful summer sunsets, but, alas, no morning warmth in winter. So the small south-facing facade only actually gets a couple of hours of light a day around solstice, witch happened last week. I thought of you, remembered you telling your husband how marvelous it would be if he would just go and crape off the tip of the hill that was shading your house. “You can do it honey!“

So, as I was soaking in the last rays for the day - at 4 PM - I was contemplating the relationship we have with the outside of our houses. Again. (Is it an obsession or a fruitful passion?)

Contrary to tropical climate houses, homes of the temperate climate have much less inside-outside space. Better said, they have either or. The tropics have a wide array of variants. I’m thinking here of tropical spaces with natural ventilation, not the thermos-boxes with air-conditioning they make nowadays in Singapore. The living room is roofed, but open, the bedroom is roofed and only partially separated from the rest of the house for privacy, the kitchen is almost totally an outside space. The toilet, well, let’s have that as an inside, closed space, but don’t forget that the privy is the original green eco composting toilet!

People live mostly outside and there is an interesting phenomenon happening: the comfort zone of the dwellers amplifies, the more they are in direct contact with their natural surroundings. There are studies in user behavior that found the more you control the inside space temperature, the more people will complain about the temperature, whereas if you just open the space to the varying temperature of the outside world, people seamlessly adapt. It’s called adaptive thermal comfort or something like that. Found a cool study here. There’s also the fact that, for the tropics at least, getting from a highly air-conditioned space out into humid and hot and then back into air-conditioned is ten times worst than just being humid and hot all the time.

Does that translate into our perception of cold in December in the South of France? I’m not sure.

Kiss the children!

With love,

Jo

For you, reader: this is an experiment. The characters to whom I write are half-real, half-not, but lets image they are you. Write back to the letter if it feels real. I’m half-real as well.