Hear stories of life in isolation from members of our team in our series Notes from Home. Here, The Modern House co-founder Albert Hill shares what he’s learning to appreciate at home during life under lockdown.

Albert Hill: What was once only a docking station, a place to recharge before heading out once again into the clatter of the wider world, now must meet new needs. With schools and workplaces wound down, high streets in hibernation and coffee shops no longer serving lattes, the home has had to absorb a wealth of activities that used to be performed elsewhere.

The anxiety that our homes would be woefully ill-equipped, becoming a nightmarish merger of under-funded school, cramped office and restaurant serving just beans and pasta (with no loo roll in the toilets) is understandable. Yet that isn’t quite what has come to pass. We realise that actually, in their own quiet way, our homes have been successfully multi-functioning for years (or rather for centuries). It’s where we’ve always cooked, read, played with the kids and even sat on the sofa sending work emails. These are simple, human things that we’ve done without labouring under the labels of ‘distance learning’ or ‘remote working’.

Now that we have the time and energy to revel in more meaningful relationships with our home what emerges are not its deficiencies but its quotidian delights. The light that filters through the trees, casting evening shadows on the wall, for instance, or the snugness of the armchair that you have never before spent so much time in. As the outside world melts away, so does much of the noise, the one-upmanship, the aspiring to something other and you are left living with what you have. And as you look around your raft, the lifeboat on this turbulent sea, you see that it’s actually rather pleasant and perhaps, even, previously a little underappreciated.

Your home also seems to be enjoying quality time spent with you. Those Monstera Deliciosa, majestic plants that are native to the tropical forests of Mexico but have been cramped in the corner of your living room, are finally getting repotted into something more befitting of their majesty. Those windows, smeared with the thin grime of the city, have had their faces wiped. Those cupboards, guiltily harbouring out-of-date paperwork and unworn clothes have been released of their heavy burden (or at least had their pain recognised). Those pictures on the wall that you’ve never really got on with have finally been stood down from duty.

In these unusual times, the concept of value has also been reappraised. As society desperately needs, for instance, the previously disregarded roles of fruit pickers, delivery drivers and deep cleaners (and not so much the sports stars, celebrities and CEOs), so too do we look at our homes and think again about everything there. We forget what we paid for something, or what magazine we saw it in, those things that seemed so important then but seem an anachronism now, and look at our world in a more honest light. It’s the way the colour catches your eye, the texture of the table when you touch it, the memories that certain bits of furniture evoke. It’s these things that become more important as they exist not in the context of the convoluted systems of the outside world that you drag in the door with you every time you return home but instead in the slower, smaller world that you find yourself in now.

Those who have a garden can’t believe their luck – their own tiny slice of our vast natural world – and those who don’t still relish their encounters with the wild world where they can. Herbs grown on the sill above the sink, crocuses pushing through cracks in the pavement and (as seen on a colleague’s social media account today) one of London’s wild green parakeets feasting on a red apple.

That’s not to say that there aren’t discomforts that emerge from a life of semi-confinement and virus avoidance. Discomforts both small, like the sting of hand sanitizer on already-cracked hands, and more enormous (where do we start) but for many they have come with the flowering of many previously hidden pleasures. An increasingly common refrain that we hear, this time in the words of a Chinese schoolteacher recently read online is “I will miss it when we go back to the fast-paced speed of the ‘real world’”.

Some people, of course, will be bearing the full brunt of what this pandemic really means either by being in the grip of, or on the front line of fighting, Covid-19. Many will be experiencing symptoms, both severe and mild, and for them the home will also be a sanatorium. In today’s world we are not so used to confronting serious illness at home – this happens in hospitals, much like the majority of births and deaths. Yet perhaps this period is also going to remind us that our marriage to our home is one that will thrive in sickness and in health.

The expectation, however, is that the majority of us will emerge from this period, this katabasis, physically unscathed and yet psychologically changed forever. We will also have a new-found love and understanding of the home that bore us through it. It will probably be emptier of stuff and yet far fuller of meaning.