REPOST: Trading Places, in Style: House Swapping for Design Professionals
The article below discusses the advent of peer-to-peer home-exchange communities, how the home-swapping process works, and the perks which draw people in.
The home-exchange website Behomm, which is open to visual artists, designers and allied professionals, lists properties from around the globe, like this recently renovated duplex flat owned by an architect couple in South London.
Image Source: nytimes.com
Sara Frisk never thought about traveling to Mexico City until a stranger named Pilar Muñoz invited her. Ms. Muñoz, a publicist for designers, lives in a 4,300-square-foot penthouse apartment with glass walls and luscious green views. The home has richly grained wood floors, trim modern sofas and a kitchen island you could sacrifice an ox on.
“If I was going to Mexico, I wanted to be on the water, but that house is completely amazing,” said Ms. Frisk, a graphic designer and design consultant in the West Town neighborhood of Chicago.
She had lost her heart on Behomm, an 18-month-old home-exchange website that has the comeliness of a shelter magazine, with one big difference: Viewers don’t just drool over beautiful properties; they stay in them.
Ms. Frisk had planned to travel over Thanksgiving and couldn’t make the timing work for the Mexico City dream loft (she ended up in the Berlin abode of two architects). Now she’s trying to arrange to stay there with a group of friends.
“It feels a lot more spontaneous planning a vacation around the home than doing all the research about where you want to go,” she said.
Like other home-swapping sites, Behomm (pronounced “be HOME”) allows its members to trade properties, simultaneously or at different times. No money changes hands, as with Airbnb. The conditions for bartering are worked out in advance, and the reciprocal arrangement helps visits run smoothly.
Arriving at their destination, guests may find wine chilling in the refrigerator, a car at their disposal and a pet waiting to be fed. The principle is mutually assured protection: Do unto another’s B&B Italia sofa as you would have someone do unto yours.
What makes Behomm different (and a likely harbinger of home-exchange sites to come) is its peer-to-peer network. All its members are visual artists, designers or allied professionals. To join, they must work in one of 98 creative disciplines listed on the application, from animator to window dresser.
And they must have a great-looking place. The landing page at behomm.com features, among other beauties, a fashion designer’s Danish beach cottage, a photographer’s 1920s Milanese flat and an architect couple’s rustic (but not really) house in the Iron Horse neighborhood of Tucson.
Given the expertise of Behomm’s members, such stylishness is almost a foregone conclusion. Or so the founders believe.
Behomm was created by Eva Calduch and Agust Juste, both 48-year-old graphic designers in Barcelona, Spain. The couple, longtime home exchangers, had become tired of slogging through the tens of thousands of entries on popular sites like HomeExchange.com.
“We were wasting hours and hours,” Ms. Calduch said. Then one day they found an architect’s stunning apartment overlooking a seaport on the Balearic island of Minorca and realized that they ought to concentrate on the residences of their peers.
They began swapping with landscape architects, photographers and interior designers, and a network started, one that became the foundation of Behomm.
The first 300 people to join were offered free lifetime memberships (like many home-exchange sites, Behomm charges annual dues). Even now, new members have a year’s free trial before they pay a fee of 95 euros (about $113).
The site has some 1,200 members, with Spain and the United States supplying the most — about 200 each. The locations are as far-flung as Bali and Florianópolis, Brazil. Even Japan has four subscribers. (A remarkable number, Ms. Calduch said, considering that a Japanese colleague told her, “We don’t even invite friends over.”)
Around 10 to 20 percent of applications are rejected, often because the homes are shown to be messy or dirty. As for the rest, choices are based on “subjective aesthetics,” in Ms. Calduch’s words. Those decisions have nothing to do with size or luxury, she added: “A tiny place with very little can be nicer or more tasteful than a castle.”
Nathalie Golliet, a designer in Paris who organizes culinary events, was one of the first to join. “I remember well, because I have the number 26,” she said.
She has made four swaps since becoming a member, including one in Marrakesh, Morocco, with Françoise Lefebvre, who shares her interest in food.
Each woman was impressed with the other’s well-equipped kitchen. Ms. Golliet even learned how to prepare Moroccan dishes from a cook Ms. Lefebvre sent over while Ms. Golliet was staying at her house.
Behomm is not the only home-exchange network to streamline its membership. A site called Seniors Home Exchange is limited to people older than 50. The rationale is that this age group isn’t hampered by school-age children with disruptive vacation schedules. What’s more, the site insists, “Our experience has been that mature people tend to take better care of things when they are not theirs.”
Trust is fundamental to home exchange, and it is easier to come by in small communities with common interests.
Arun Sundararajan, a professor at the Stern School of Business at N.Y.U., who researches the digital sharing economy, said social media platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn, and tools that verify one’s real-life identity, now allow us to vouch for a person’s credibility and good intentions.
Trust can be cultivated even in high-stakes situations like “letting a stranger into your bedroom,” he said, or in the case of long-distance ride-sharing programs like carpooling.com, “letting a stranger drive you to a strange city.” This makes the time ripe for a peer-to-peer home-swapping venture that draws new people in.
For their part, Behomm’s members spoke of the comfort they found in their intimate network, the novelty of stepping into one another’s shoes and the value of acquaintances that bloom into friendships or business opportunities.
“It goes way beyond sharing a home — you share your lives,” said Alex Trochut, a graphic designer and illustrator who lives in New York and Barcelona. Mr. Trochut described the Behomm experience as the “very opposite of Airbnbn, because you feel entitled to things when you pay for them. This is about giving and not receiving.”
Can it really be that good? Ms. Calduch said that she has refereed only two small conflicts in the last year and a half. One involved cleaning. “There was a misunderstanding,” she recalled. The other had to do with confusion over which of a member’s multiple homes was being offered.
To fend off squabbles, she supplies forms that allow users to specify all the terms for an exchange, including stipulations for purging cat hair and sharing toys. Still, conversations with some Behomm members suggested ample room for dispute.
For instance, Wendy Rommers and her husband, Bas van Schelven, often swap their primary residence near Amsterdam, which is a houseboat.
Ms. Rommers, who is a multidisciplinary designer (Mr. van Schelven owns the company that makes the boats), said that the vessel doesn’t have particular maintenance needs, though she advises keeping the water running on freezing nights. As for safety, there are life jackets, “and things you can throw into the water” that a drowning person might grasp. She made no mention of liability insurance.
Indeed, one of the few negative anecdotes came from Mr. Trochut, and he was the cause of havoc. While he and a girlfriend were staying in Copenhagen in 2008, his companion had an asthma attack that put her in the hospital.
His hosts were so helpful in advising the couple on medical care that Mr. Trochut decided to repay them by washing the bed linens. Eager to finish before they returned home, he set the washer at the highest speed, which produced vibrations that caused the machine to tumble onto the adjacent bathroom sink, crushing the perfume bottles lined up there.
Mr. Trochut discovered the carnage just as his hosts walked in. “We got to an agreement,” he said. “I paid for everything.”
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