The Rhythms of the Winter Residence

The winter residence, in the houses where the practice is properly maintained, is not in any meaningful sense a holiday house. It is a parallel household. It has its own staff, its own suppliers, and its own standing arrangements with local professionals. Its unobtrusive rhythms continue throughout the months when the principal is in residence elsewhere. The principal's arrival on the first evening of the season should produce no perceptible change in the operation of the house. The fire is laid as it is laid every evening. The table is set as it is set every evening. The principal slips into the rhythm of the residence as if the months of absence had been a single afternoon.

We are sometimes engaged by principals who have recently acquired a second residence and who wish to establish it on this footing. The work is patient and substantial. We counsel against the temptation, in the early years, to operate the residence on a reduced basis during the months of absence. A household shut down between visits, however carefully, will always receive the returning principal awkwardly. It presents the small failures of preparation that any visitor would notice. The principal, more than any visitor, will register them.

A winter residence sits, in most cases, in a location and a community which is materially different from the principal's primary establishment. The relationships which the residence maintains with that locality are part of what makes the principal's residence in it agreeable. There are the standing arrangements with the local physician, the local vintner, the local game dealer, the local florist, and the church if the principal observes. Each of these is the result of patient cultivation by the caretaker, conducted on the principal's behalf throughout the year. Each contributes to the sense, on the principal's arrival, that the residence is properly embedded in its place rather than a guarded enclave imported from elsewhere.

We close with a small reflection on the private pleasure of the second residence, which is distinct from the pleasure of the primary establishment. By long convention, the second residence is the place where the principal allows the rhythm of life to slow. The post is dealt with at a different pace. The appointments of the day are fewer and the evenings are longer. The conversation with one’s family and one’s most trusted guests has a quality that only an unhurried setting can produce. The household that permits this rhythm to take hold has given the principal something which no commercial arrangement can replicate.