I have never been very good at thinking of these houses as “rooms”.
I know that, technically, this is what they are now. They have numbers, reservations, check-in times and all the other practical things that come with welcoming guests.
But long before anyone arrived here with a suitcase and a reservation, they were simply homes.
These houses have belonged to my family for generations. They have seen children grow up, families change, people leave the island and others return. People cooked here, slept here, argued here, celebrated here and carried on with the ordinary business of living.
I did some of those things here myself.
Perhaps once you have known a house that way, it becomes difficult to reduce it to a room number.
There are still things inside the houses that belonged to my great-grandmother — wardrobes, chests, mirrors and objects that once had perfectly ordinary jobs.
But I don’t want the houses to exist only in the past.
They are not museums, and I have never wanted them to feel like museums. A home changes because the people living in it change.
They move things, add things, make things. They decide that something belongs in a particular corner for reasons that may make perfect sense only to them.
House 3, for example, has the old wardrobe and chest that belonged to my great-grandmother.
It also has hats — full-sized hats, made from clay. I made those.
There is probably no particularly sensible historical connection between my great-grandmother’s furniture and a collection of ceramic hats made by her great-granddaughter.
I don’t think there needs to be.
They belong to different moments in the life of the same family — and now they live in the same house.
I like that much more than the idea of carefully recreating a particular period.
The houses were never frozen in time when my great-grandmother lived here. Why should I freeze them now?
Every generation changed something and brought something of its own.
I have done the same.
And now another layer has been added — people arrive from all over the world and live here for a few days at a time.
They don’t become part of the family history in the same way, of course. But for those few days, the houses become part of their lives too.
Breakfast happens on the terrace. Clothes go into the old wardrobe. A book is left beside the bed. Someone sits in the same place every morning with their coffee. Someone takes a photograph, celebrates an anniversary or watches their child discover a favourite corner.
Then the suitcases come out again and they leave.
The house stays.
This is perhaps the difference, for me, between a room and a home.
A room can be prepared for someone. A home has already been lived in.
It contains things that were there before you arrived and will remain after you leave. It carries traces of people who may never have met one another — and somehow makes space for the next person too.
My great-grandmother’s wardrobe.
My clay hats.
Someone else’s suitcase.
Different lives, different times — all occupying the same house.
Perhaps that is why, when I had to decide what to call this place, I couldn’t think of anything else.
Not rooms. Not suites. Not villas.
‘Spitia’ — Houses.
Because that is what they have always been.