Opinion: While a house’s perfect walls and floors and furniture are all very good and, to me, desirable, it is in its scars and years of wear that we are reflected

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On our evening walks, the dog and I have the dark streets to ourselves, and as we make our way through our suburban neighbourhood, we can see into homes lit up from the inside, with their windows framing bright blocks of light and, sometimes, the eerie indigo glow of a television.

My neighbourhood was once downscale — “quirky” was a word I once heard used to describe it — because it was a beach community populated by artists, latter-day hippies, and young families who couldn’t afford any of the city’s more expensive neighbourhoods. The houses were mostly one-storey beach cottages and ersatz home-builds, and they never aspired to be anything more than modest.

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Over the past decade, however, many of the old homes and the big trees that towered over them have fallen to the wrecking ball, and in their place have risen two- and three-storey faux farmhouse-style manses. They are attractive homes, tastefully un-garish, with their driveways crowded by Land Rovers and Mercedes and Audis and Porsches.

Landscaping firms, once never seen in the neighbourhood, now do a booming business here — apparently, the new homeowners are either too busy or too disinclined to garden — and there has been a proliferation of artificial turf lawns installed by those homeowners who find even cutting the grass bothersome.

The........

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