Kyle Chayka: Last summer, my now-wife Jess and I took a summer vacation to France. First we stopped off at Hyères, a beautiful town on the Mediterranean coast, and then we met a bunch of friends to rent a house further inland in the Provençal village of Eygalières. It was a dreamy trip, and as with any nice locale, I immediately started looking up local real estate. The Zillow for France, you may be interested to know, is called Green Acres. I now get far too many email alerts from Green Acres every day, and I open almost all of them.
Most of the listed properties are utter fantasy: $3 million stone farmhouses with salt-water pools or compounds with private beaches. But others seem tantalizingly feasible, especially when compared to the American real-estate market. Take this €216,000 “SMALL PROVENÇAL FARMHOUSE” for example: Sure, it’s one bedroom and there’s basically a couch in the kitchen. But it’s “Very close to the town center of Sainte-Maxime,” according to the auto-translated broker copy, which turns out to be a pleasant-looking town just across the bay from the much more famous Saint-Tropez.
It’s hard to decide what to prioritize in my wishful thinking: Should I go for an entire house in a tiny stone village like Eygalières where I know every resident — chatting with them in my newly acquired French, of course — or a smaller place in a more bustling town, more like Saint-Rémy-de-Provence? Here’s a nice three-floor stone townhouse for €155,000 in the village of Callian, which is not too far from the coast but enough inland for access to nearby farms. Though maybe I’d prefer two windows per floor in Callian instead of one for €395,000. If I’m craving civilization, there’s an artist’s studio in the picturesque old port of Marseille. (Or, for a different fantasy, try this directory of waterfront properties for sale in Greece, or search for an unrenovated merchant house in Kyoto.)
Surfing Zillow for DC or NYC is no longer fun nor escapist; it’s just depressing. Personally, I don’t think every apartment should cost $1 million. Price-wise, the obscure French towns are much more accessible. I can work remote! And then rent it out to TikTok tourists in the high season. But then the other logistics creep in: Where to keep the car that I inevitably need to get there? How will our dog make it to France? Will I become a cheese monger or a butcher? Maybe I should just keep Airbnbing for a few more years…
Nate Gallant: Personally, I became addicted to scrolling Zillow during early-2020 pandemic isolation. I was not on social media, and the promise of thoughtlessly and endlessly scrolling through new images, with the guarantee of seeing no trace of COVID news or Trump's face, felt very satisfying. Any smooth extension of space would do at that point; in the same way that many wandered idly through their virtual farmlands in Stardew Valley or the expansive world of Breath of the Wild, I wandered the thumbnails of unaffordable estates in Bar Harbor and Garrison. Otherwise stuck working from home through a tiny Zoom screen on an old computer in my small apartment, I looked for a timeless expanse in which to project some sense of freedom.
But as the physical apertures of life widened again, I was re-acquainted with the desires of my thirties and the choke-points of the regular old American real estate-market. The future loomed once more. My desire to stop moving (ten times in five years, at that point) and no longer deal with predatory landlords was leveraged against one of the more shit housing markets in some time. Achieving some combination of downtown proximity, where there are jobs, with access to nature, where there is peace of mind, seemed impossible. And continuing to scroll Zillow only confirmed this.
In this way, the Zillow experience trafficks in nearly the same level of emotional stakes as a dating app: gamifying some of your most primal fears, needs, and dreams to mine human behavior for commodifiable data. The feeling of impossibility, and thus the continued failure of your search and use of their platform, is actually their goal, their ability to monetize. I agree with Kyle: because looking at apartments or houses in the US feels frustratingly unattainable, the space of pure fantasy, I desire to at the very least indulge in a worthwhile fantasy. If it's only a dream, why dream in terms of a cramped galley kitchen with vaguely nice metal appliances, or wince at another hundred cheaply designed, spare, gentrification cubes? Our fantasies needn't be minimalist.
Yet here is where we depart. French countryside life does not appeal to me. The idea of French living appeals very little to me. Maybe it's my distaste for a good deal of the cuisine; a difficult and brief experience in Narbonne some years ago; or the fact that I'm reading Matthieu Enard's new cosmic nightmare of the French countryside, The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers' Guild. My personal fantasies lay a bit further south, and mostly in Sicily.
The allure, for me, rests on the fantasy of ease in having some concrete, less mediated connection with a place. In the case of my idea of Sicily, this feels true in a variety of ways, fed to me entirely by the internet, and which may not necessarily be exclusive to Southern Italy. Could it be the sublime nature, relatively affordable from a home overlooking the sea? The promise of exceedingly good, in-season produce which I could afford to buy and cook for myself? Living amidst the legibility of the history and aesthetics of a place, say, in the ancient city of Siracusa? (Of course it still has a waterfront view.)
Maybe these allures are bound within the fantasies of heritage: If I cannot have an enduring, material connection to the cities where I have felt most at home or the earth to which my body could feel a connection to its own stuff, then let me at least go live in an 18th century apartment complex in Palermo, and explore the environs of my grandparents. Or perhaps a part of me just wants to embrace my inner, hermetic metaphysician. To be able to fuck off and wander around an old monastery with my dog for awhile.
It might feel conceptually pedantic to distinguish between the idea of two fantasies. But I don't think either of us are after some hyper-nostalgic Eurocore fantasy or even La Dolce Vita, per se. I think many people long for many other kinds of worlds. At times more just. At times merely more luxurious. And sometimes, just a bit easier and prettier, with very, very good cannoli.
In the comments
What’s your fantasy (villa)?