You’re gorgeous, baby, you’re sophisticated, you live well... Vancouver is Manhattan with mountains. It’s a liquid city, a tomorrow city, ... It’s the cool North American sibling.
~ New York Times
People usually are the happiest at home. ~ William Shakespeare
We shape our dwellings, and afterwards our dwellings shape us. ~ Winston Churchill
The universe is merely a fleeting idea in God's mind - a pretty uncomfortable thought, particularly if you've just made a down payment on a house. ~ Woody Allen
No man but feels more of a man in the world if he have but a bit of ground that he can call his own. However small it is on the surface, it is four thousand miles deep; and that is a very handsome property. ~ Charles Dudley Warner
It always amazes me to think that every house on every street is full of so many stories, so many triumphs and tragedies, and all we see are yards and driveways. ~ Glenn Close
People are living longer than ever before, a phenomenon undoubtedly made necessary by the 30-year mortgage. ~ Doug Larson
This house isn't mine anymore, but the memories are; the memories can't be sold. The building that housed my once-upon-a-time dreams stands for someone else now, as it did for the people before us, and I feel happy to let it go. Happy that I can begin again. ~ Cecelia Ahern
A comfortable house is a great source of happiness. It ranks immediately after health and a good conscience. ~ Sydney Smith
Home is the most popular, and will be the most enduring of all earthly establishments. ~ Channing Pollock
If you want a golden rule that will fit everything, this is it: Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful. ~ William Morris
If I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace. ~ Gaston Bachelard
I am grateful for the lawn that needs mowing, windows that need cleaning, and floors that need waxing because it means I have a home. ~Author Unknown
A terraced house on a tree-lined street. Earlier today, the house rang with the sound of children's cries and adult voices, but since the last occupant took off (with her satchel) a few hours ago, it has been left to sample the morning by itself. The sun has risen over the gables of the buildings opposite and now washes through the ground-floor windows, painting the interior walls a buttery yellow and warming the grainy-red brick facade. Within shafts of sunlight, platelets of dust move as if in obedience to the rhythms of a silent waltz. From the hallway, the low murmur of accelerating traffic can be detected a few blocks away. Occasionally, the letter-box opens with a rasp to admit a plaintive leaflet.
The house gives signs of enjoying the emptiness. It is rearranging itself after the night, clearing its pipes and cracking its joints. This dignified and seasoned creature, with its coppery veins and wooden feet nestled in a bed of clay, has endured much: balls bounced against its garden flanks, doors slammed in rage, headstands attempted along its corridors, the weight and sighs of electrical equipment and the probing of inexperienced plumbers in its innards. A family of four shelters in it, joined by a colony of ants around the foundations and, in spring time, by broods of robins in the chimney stack. It also lends a shoulder to a frail (or just indolent) sweet -pea which leans against the garden wall, indulging the peripatetic courtship of a circle of bees.
The house has grown into a knowledgeable witness. It has been party to early seductions, it has watched homework being written, it has observed swaddled babies freshly arrived from the hospital, it has been surprised in the middle of the night by whispered conferences in the kitchen. It has experienced winter evenings when its windows were as cold as bags of frozen peas and midsummer dusks when its brick walls held the warmth of newly baked bread.
It has provided not only physical but also psychological sanctuary. It has been a guardian of identity. Over the years, its owners have returned from periods away and, on looking around them, remembered who they were. Although this house may lack solutions to a great many of its occupants' ills, its rooms nevertheless give evidence of a happiness to which architecture has made its distinctive contribution.
~ Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness
30 minutes before every open house :)
Owning real estate...
Anything for the right catchment (don't watch with a little one... tad scary at end)