There’s a particular humiliation that comes from being corrected about Spain by a Frenchman.
It happened on Jordi’s terrace last Thursday evening, somewhere between the olives and the second bottle of something that claimed to be “natural wine” but tasted faintly of barn roof.
We were talking about houses.
This started because Marta had announced she was thinking of replacing the windows in her place. The old ones rattle in the wind like a skeleton playing maracas, which is charming until winter arrives and the living room begins impersonating a wind tunnel.
Naturally this triggered a multilingual discussion.
“Les fenêtres,” said Luc, leaning back like a man about to deliver architectural wisdom. Luc is French, has been in Spain about six months, and already speaks about the country with the confidence of someone who believes owning a linen shirt qualifies him as Mediterranean.
“The houses here,” he said, waving his glass vaguely toward the hills, “they are designed wrong.”
This was a bold statement considering half the terrace consisted of people who were born within twenty kilometres of where we were sitting.
Jordi looked amused.
“Wrong how?”
Luc explained, slowly, as if addressing a class of mildly disappointing students.
“In France we build for winter. Thick walls, yes, but the windows – they are balanced. Here, everyone wants light. So much glass. Then in August everyone hides behind the shutters like vampires.”
He wasn’t entirely wrong.
Modern villas around here do have a strange relationship with sunlight. Architects seem determined to invite as much of it inside as physically possible, which works beautifully in property photos and slightly less beautifully when your living room becomes the interior of a greenhouse by mid-afternoon.
Marta nodded.
“My cousin’s house in Jávea,” she said. “All glass. Beautiful. In July you cannot sit in the lounge until ten at night.”
Luc looked smug.
“Exactly.”
At this point someone refilled my glass and the conversation drifted into that pleasant Mediterranean territory where everyone is technically arguing but nobody is angry.
Windows. Shutters. Solar panels. Someone mentioned insulation. Someone else said insulation was for Germans.
Eventually Jordi’s neighbour Paco joined us. Paco is seventy-something and has the slow patience of a man who has watched several generations rediscover obvious things.
“You foreigners always make houses complicated,” he said.
He pointed to the hillside.
“Old houses there — small windows. Thick walls. Terrace on the evening side. That’s it.”
Paco shrugged like the entire field of architecture had just been solved.
Later that night, walking home, I started thinking about it properly.
Spain has ridiculous amounts of sunlight. More than most northern Europeans know what to do with. Yet half the houses built for foreign buyers treat the sun like an unexpected guest that has arrived three hours early and refuses to leave.
That’s probably why people keep talking about adapting houses instead of replacing them.
I’d actually stumbled across a project recently while going down one of my late-night internet rabbit holes – VillaVita – which looks at upgrading existing villas so they work properly with Mediterranean sunlight instead of fighting it. Better glazing, solar integration, things like that. The sort of quiet improvements Paco would probably approve of, although he’d still insist the real solution was thicker walls and fewer windows.
When I mentioned this to Marta the next day she just laughed.
“Of course foreigners are fixing the houses again.”
She may have a point.
But the truth is we’re all still learning how to live here properly. The locals figured out the basics centuries ago. The rest of us are slowly catching up, usually after spending one entire summer sitting inside a perfectly designed glass box wondering why the sofa feels like a frying pan.
Luc, naturally, now believes he was right all along.
Which is probably the most French outcome possible.
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