#1: Introducing Magic Habitat 2.0
A Spanish Road trip documenting our chaotic quest to buy a home here
Magic Habitat is a Substack documenting our gloriously overthought and occasionally unhinged journey to find a house to buy in Spain. A compendium of all the bizarre places we have viewed across the country in our pursuit of Something Different™️. Written by me, a Creative Strategist who naively thought that it wouldn’t be this complicated.
It’s been four years since we last arrived into your inbox, back when all we did was interview people who’d successfully made the jump to living abroad. We loved sharing those stories—so much, in fact, that we decided to write a new chapter: our own.
In this fresh (and frankly, more unhinged) incarnation of Magic Habitat, we’re taking you along on our real estate rollercoaster in Spain.
If you’re ready to trade interviews for first-hand chaos—and maybe get inspired (or warned) along the way - stick around. We promise it’ll be more entertaining than any property listing you’ve scrolled in the last year.
England
Spring 2023
Work from home. Work from anywhere. Kitchen table doubling as a desk. Sofa doubling as a conference room. Google Meet stuttering. Laptop overheating. Farrow & Ball walls closing in—Setting Plaster, obviously.
Wishing for a window. Wishing for a view. An orchard? The ocean? A pool? A point?
Let’s move abroad. Okay. Where? Spain. Why not. Two hours from home. Where’s home? Doesn’t matter. Sell it. Sell everything.
Get the visas. Pack the cat. Touch down.
Buy a house.
But where?
Barcelona? Too loud. Valencia? Too TikTok. Marbella? Too obvious.
Too many choices. Too much scrolling. Too much dreaming. The Paradox of Choice.
What’s the budget? What’s the vibe? What’s the feeling?
A farmhouse. But near a city. Still clinging to the idea we are thirty-something urbanites. By the beach? Sure. With land? Maybe. But not too much. Quiet luxury? Definitely not.
Creatively chaotic. That’s the brief.
Welcome to the Magic Habitat 2.0.
Hundreds of houses. Thousands of miles. Our gloriously overthought and occasionally irrational journey to find a house to buy in Spain.
Coming up in a few days: How we landed in a beach house on Mallorca, discovered an entire island’s worth of stiff chairs, an IKEA devotion, and stumbled upon an abandoned cinema for sale with far more than we bargained for. Until next time…