The Watchmaker's House

Originally written June 19th, 2022
​Andy and I travel a lot, but owning a home abroad wasn’t really something we ever talked about. I think we likened the idea of it to extensive wealth and a certain kind of person. One with great means, class and status. We’ve always felt like two kids from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania who worked hard and had nice things, but were in a completely different league. 
The talk about owning a home abroad all started one afternoon after our respective work days had wrapped up. I was sitting on the couch when Andy walked into the living room, furiously scrolling on his phone.  For the past few days, he had been following a producer friend’s journey through holiday home owning via their instagram stories. Lisa and her husband, Nick, had just purchased a little cottage in Acadia, New York and were spending a lot of their newly found free time renovating the space to rent it. Covid seemed like the perfect time to take on such a large scale project. As he scrolled through their progress pictures on his phone, he turned to me with such stark sincerity and asked, “What do you think about owning a vacation cabin?” I knew his question was more about floating a larger idea than it was asking about a specific location or type of holiday home. By asking this question, he was opening the door to the larger idea of second home owning, which is something I’ve always wanted to do. I loved the idea of having a second property as a rental or the idyllic thought of opening an old B and B and catering to an eclectic mix of guests from all over the world. We’ve always said how nice it would be to have a rental or two, but time and money had always prevented us from talking about it in depth or with serious intention.
I pulled my knees to my chest, coddling my teacup between my hands and the notch between my knees. Andy sat down next to me, continually scrolling through the photos. I didn’t answer immediately. Giving his question a thoughtful pause, I pictured us sitting in a cabin, fire roaring. “We aren’t really cabin people”, I told him, finally snapping back to reality and taking a sip of my tea. My mind instantly floated back to the image of us in a cabin, looking at each other, wondering what we could do, (what we SHOULD do) other than being in the cabin, which I know for most people is half the fun. Something about the idea of being secluded in the woods with only large, wild animals as your closest signs of life seemed a bit suffocating to me. Andy grew up in the heart of Buffalo and had moved to Pittsburgh to work on his undergrad at The University of Pittsburgh, so small-city living is all he has ever really known. I, on the other hand, spent my first 20 years in a small, seven street town where no one locked their doors and each of the residents knew everyone else’s business. If you sneezed your neighbor two blocks away was coming by with a pot of chicken soup and a friendly “bless you.” It wasn’t until my late twenties when I moved to Pittsburgh and began “city” living. I wouldn’t exactly call us “city slickers” by any means, but rural or roughing it wouldn't be words that would immediately jump to mind either. Andy grabbed some of the covers, scooching over to share the photos. I turned my thoughts back to the conversation at hand.
“What a cool space!” I said, peeking over his shoulder at his phone. “They’re really doing a great job with it,” I started, “but when you and I travel, we go to Europe. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a landing pad for all of our European adventures?” I said, taking the phone in one hand, my tea in another. I enlarged the current photo, studying all of the thoughtfully placed furniture and decorations.

That simple question was all it took to break up the monotony of what had become our daily lives. Instantly, our mornings were spent perusing village cottages over our ritualistic coffee, starring and circicling potential purchases as if looking over a supermarket weekly ad. Then, after a few days of accumulating a list, we’d sift through the homes we had liked, looking up where the small hamlet or village was located, familiarizing ourselves with the lesser-known French countryside. Homes that made the cut were sent to Agnès, my French friend who lived in the north, for further review. “No, not that town. That town has a racist, homophobic mayor. He’s in the press a lot, but not for good things.” Having Agnès to help shape our list was an extra layer of security that we didn’t even know we needed. She steered us clear of regions and towns that were finding themselves in turmoil or scandal for one reason or another or just didn’t align with Andy and I’s free-spirited, liberal ways. And so, the filtering process continued until we built ourselves a pretty substantial list of loved and desired homes. Some were dreamy, once loved châteaux that had crumbling walls and viney overgrown gardens.Others were tiny village houses, with inviting, original wood-beamed ceilings and craggy stone walls. Many on the list weren’t exactly practical, but again, this was more of a distraction than a serious list of well thought through homes to buy.
Our wants for a home were simple, we didn’t want to live in a city, but we didn’t want to live somewhere without basic commerce. As we would not be there to maintain it, a garden or home with large quantities of land was out of the question, though Andy did want a small terrace or balcony. As Covid did a circus-level tumbling act right outside of our door, spiking one day then nose diving the next, these little mornings gave us hope and an activity to pass the time. It also allowed us to think about the future and provided us motivation when times were bleak and didn’t seem to have an end in sight. House hunting was the perfect, hypothetical distraction until one morning, in between the CBS news and breakfast, we stumbled across the watchmaker's home. 

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