LIVING CLOSE TO THE WATER
ON FLOATING HOMES AND DRIFTING VILLAS
All over the world people love to live on the water, be it on houseboats or on floating wellness temples. Of late, it has been increasingly fashionable to take up residence on a far-from-firm surface. Water enthusiasts the world over are enjoying an idyllic on-board life in so-called floating homes, without ever leaving their home port.
Anchorage for life
They bobble gently off Seattle, Hamburg, Amsterdam, Key West or on the Seine in Paris: houses as floating platforms, so-called floating homes. Anyone living on them turns makes water his or her home, without moving hardly a meter. Because in the absence of an engine, the floating homes tend to be stationary, ensuring they are fixed shore-line abodes for their inhabitants, without any land needing to be owned. The maritime standards they set their inhabitants thus consist simply of nurturing an open style of living, with no fences, high walls or hedges, the fixed-berth captains live alongside floating neighbours and harbour staff. Depending on in which corner of the earth they have chosen to drop anchor, they will be awakened by the throb of a tramp steamer passing by, or by pleasure-trippers at sea.
Most of the floating homes function according to the principle of a pontoon-cum-house and tend to be fastened to land with steel anchor poles. In some places, such as in Denmark, they are grouped to form small settlements. Elsewhere, they actually form entire floating districts, as for example the Rummelsberger Bay in Berlin. If absolutely necessary, a floating home can be moved to other aquatic quarters, although usually that requires a tug or two. Which is why floating homes should not be confused with houseboats, their motorized and highly mobile sisters that can move from cost to coast under their own steam.
Sedentary water philosophers
The inhabitants of the floating homes are ostensibly a real people unto themselves. Or so the operators of the www.floatinghomes.com Web site claim. They report that this chosen lifestyle involves a spatial and a philosophical/free-thinking bond. Thus, apparently land-based residents are green with envy when they see you sitting day after day on deck listening to the soothing sound of the lapping water - content with yourself and your beautiful postcard-idyll world. Where else can the notion of a sedentary life be linked so easily and durably to the infinite expanse of the ocean?
This Romantic notion of dropping out has a touch of the Golden Days o Hippie California about it. Back in the late 1960s, the Flower Power generation sat in the bay at Sausalito on floating homes, communally awash with the freedom of the Pacific. Whereas a glance from San Francisco out beyond the Golden Gate Bridge today toward Sausalito offers little of the former audacious pacifist joys. Instead, you see the rank and file, the clear grid of some 450 floating homes, now the residences of the better-off. Little seems to remain of that warm open-minded spirit that brought free love on-board to the rhythm of the swaying planks. The inhabitants who have today sought out the proximity of the water seem decidedly more establishment.
Space not dream?
Even if today's floating homes are a haven for the prosperous, it all started out far more pragmatically, namely with the creation of new residential space.
Waterwoning in Amsterdam saved people from the lack of post-War housing. Even the water-bound homes off Sausalito had a serious background: Although the one or other dates back to a temple of wellbeing before the 19th century, they first became important after the fierce quake of 1906, when they served as emergency accommodation for many San Franciscans. In fact, in various countries and communities the lack of living space has led to entire water-based cities being devised. In Japan, architect Kiyonori Kikutake is known as the "father of the cities at sea", modular floating isles up to 800km long. He made his first prototype Aquapolis in 1975 on the occasion of the international Ocean Expo in Okinawa. The miniature city that formerly functioned as a leisure park now rusts away to the ebb and flow of the tides.
Even today many maritime building projects are justified by the lack of space or land. In Scandinavia, student halls of residence and other state-supported homes rest on rafts, whereas in Germany the welfare component is hardly of import. The high prices for living on German water indicate that here the focus is on realizing the floating dreams of the more affluent. After all, so German construction companies groan, the ongoing running costs of water-based properties are far higher than on terra firma - from the heating through to the maintenance.
Havens for design enthusiasts
Apart from the costs, floating homes also stand out from those on land visually. Ever since architectural offices have discovered the flow, the floating residences have been increasingly unusual. Owners love these properties because they do not fit in with the mainstream and are truly expensive. It is fashionable and also not cheap to turn your breakfast table and home to face the rising sun and to greet your floating neighbours with a lifestylish "Ahoy".
Above all European architects are busy at the drawing board, specifically in Scandinavia and Germany. Instead of the Victorian flair formerly imported from the United States, of late a high-grade and high-tech ambience has tempted customers to try life afloat in exclusive and stylish homes with a timeless and plain design but quite a price tag. (In Berlin, for example, interested parties will need to pay about half a million euros for about 200 sq. m. of floating residence.) If a fashionable floating bungalow is not sufficiently down to earth, then consult one of the real visionaries, such as Italian maritime designer Giancarlo Zema. His Trilobis 65 floating home is a luxury water temple shaped like a huge Pac-Man. It boasts four levels housing up to six persons - and one of them is below water level. The Trilobis 65 is partially mobile and can chug along at 13 kmh to your private beach. (If this has already you're your thirst, simply buy Zema's waterfront home at the click of a mouse at the online outlet of Conley's, the fashion and trendy mail-order company - for a mere EUR 3,200,000. A clear case for a "last-minute floater", a you only have to pay EUR 6.80 postage and packaging.)
The waterbound comfort villas of today have little in common with the improvised habitats of the drifting freaks. Not that one of these floating homes brings to mind sea-faring and adventure. After all, whoever lives in it wishes first and foremost to forget for a moment the compulsions of living on terra firma and instead, lulled my soft waves, drift mentally through distant parts, while the sushi delivery service rings the bell at the head of the jetty.
