Why a house?

My sl fam and I share a 60x60 platform at 1000 meters. We have sort of breezeway platform house decorated with a lot of framed pictures of the fam... many flowers, a meadow, some lovely trees and their shadows, some chairs, blankets, pillow talks here and there, a few cats, and a couple of Animania toucans flying about. A couple of sound generators... it's lovely, quiet, immersive. After working it up for a month or so, it feels like "home". I really should fence the edges

(sighs - posted - again - by Eveline N. - using Sophie's login. I'm sorry Sophia - at least I didn't swear this time!)

QFT! (if you're able to properly decipher it )

I live inside a cliff, behind a waterfall, in one of the Bliss Gardens residential sims

If we start asking why we want houses, we end up asking why we want anything. We want houses for the same reason that we want a landscape, nice clothes, attractive or interesting avatars. Ultimately, SL could be reduced to a flat grey grid with grey spheres as avatars.

I tryed a house or two when I first acquired land. I wanted privacy an security an such. Found it stuffy an annoying 'cause my cam kept getting stuck in walls. I usually end up with open plywood boxes, soon deleted.

I now live on a sky platform. Sometimes with invisi walls, sometimes not. Furnished sometimes, oft not. Maybe, a house will appear, but its only a 3D doodle, most likely erased soon after. My concept of privacy an security has changed.

Kitsy ^.^

My first six months inworld, I rented a very nice skybox. (VERY nice, roomy, configurable, big television, sexbed, the works.) It was great for entertaining friends, luring unsuspecting female avatars, and had a big roof for my early experiments at building. The biggest bonus was that it was SUPER private - a security-orbed skybox over a private island outsiders couldn't create an LM on. It was awesome.

Then I bought some mainland where I am now, and built a house. Followed by a clubhouse (what a failure THAT was). Followed by another house. And it occurred to me that the only reason I thought I needed a house was for the sake of having a house. Having a "home location" is normal and natural - even games like WoW give you the ability to create a default location for teleporting and starting off from. The idea of "home" is quite ingrained into our psyche.

Now I have a small skybox, with pictures of friends and SL mementos, where I can entertain, hold the occasional business-related discussion, and do some light building. The rest is a public garden. I have to admit I like the garden more than I've liked my houses so far.

I have a beautiful home not just a house and it is somewhere private for Master and I

I don't have a house or land, and do not intend to. When I am not doing something in SL, I log off

and quit. At night I am in my own RL (or perhaps a hotel's) bed and my computer is off.

Mary

I have a beautiful house in Desolation (I've been told it's the nicest decorated place in the entire sim). I actually spend quite a bit of time there & have friends over frequently. It also has a nice dock with 7 Seas fishing. My home is comfortable & entertaining - especially the third floor "playroom". I have a lot of artwork in my house, tv's, good music & it reflects my tastes & who I am. I log out there every night & start every day there. I love my home!

Why do you choose to replicate an average real life setting within a virtual world where pretty much any setting and environement is possibe?

Not being critical at all, but like the OP I am intrigued as to why people replicate a standard real life existence in SL.

I completely get why people need to have a base in sl. I have a simple one-roomed home (friends have described it as a disused 1930's public utility building..but they are rude and I happen to love that look). It's important to me to have some inner sanctum for keeping the odd memento of my life, and thinking space. Mostly though home is outside in a shared garden where anything can wander in, and I love reading how many of you have done the same.

What I do find really interesting is the two camps home-owners fall into...those who have rl-styled working kitchens and bathrooms and those who dont. (Like who on earth feels the need to log on for a wee?) And I wonder what correlation there is between these two types of home-owners and how they live their sl? Like are sl kitchen-owners more likely to have rl-styled relationships like jobs and conventional marriages than the I-live-in-a-glowing-sphere-or-giant-mushroom type?

I have a house in SL. I do not have a job there nor do I ever intend to. My BF and I do not share the home, we have separate residences. Nor, are we partnered despite the fact that in RL, we are living together. In fact, we tend to do pretty much our own thing separate from each other inworld more frequently than not as we have different reasons for being in SL.

So, for us? No correlation to being conventional. My choice of a house, has more to do with my love of architecture, landscaping and design.

I agree. The few times I've gone without a "home" were very disorienting to me. Sure I was able to use a friends place as home or NCI, but it really just wasn't the same. For me, the sense of home is very important regardless of the fact that I don't have houses anymore.

aaah.....very good question.....lol

Actually......for me it was a slow progression. At first....I really just wanted my own area to 'set home to' so when I logged in day after day I had a base. Someplace to unpack boxes.......decorate.....practice my newly learned SL skills.

But recently......it has become more about creating a tribute to the people I love. I have never had a 'home' in SL in the traditional sense......I have owned land and rezzed a house......but I was always just into the idea of decorating is a style that appealed to me. I never had a bathroom or a kitchen. LOL To me that seemed pointless.

Now....my 'house' is really a building that I can use both as a gallery and studio. The gallery will be dedicated to my mom's art work (she had MS and passed in 2006 and I have always want to use her work to help support MS research.....I have found that venue in SL)......The island itself is a tribute to me dad.....who we lost in 2005 (emphisema) So....right now my motive is very much of a cathartic, theraputic nature. I love the process of creating a beautiful environment that refelcts the inspirations of both my parents. My mother, the artist, my father, the ocean loving old soul. My land is a very rugged raised terrain with cliffs....a lighthouse and a seperate little craggy island that I sort of added a surreal flare to.

So why do I have a house in SL......because I want one. It makes me happy.....it sooths me.....and it serves a greater purpose that I have wanted to pursue for a while now. IRL it would have taken me weeks, if not months to put together something with my mom's art to help benefit MS research.....in SL...it took me all of two hours and I had people donating and admiring my mom's work......from all over the globe. Where else can one make that happen?

Ph yeah....and I'm an artist by nature.....so the idea of having land and a home to develope in my own vision is quite appealing on a very base level. I love to create images of beauty....SL is just one more way to make that happen.

Why not? It feel comfy to me.

Ok ok I agree. I'll allow a spa in my non-realistic home. Very fun.

I would like to leave the 'house' concept behind at some point but only when I have managed to work up a build that functions comfortably with the client.

I found it very useful to work on a building when I first rented a plot and started to learn the basics of building in SL. Unhappily that turned out to be a monolithic bunker and I'm still working very slowly on my second home, which I deliberately modeled on a more traditional style I am familiar with in RL. This provides a useful benchmark in my head while I come to terms with the tools, the physics engine and other behaviours of the SL client.

I wanted the second 'home' to be something quite small and intimate like a farmhouse, for instance, but I learnt that rooms need to be of a certain height in order to accept teleporting avatars and the default settings of the camera (I'm a great believer in working to accommodate the 'plain vanilla' settings of the client). Likewise, I built a full-prim staircase that gave me a great deal of trouble initially because I had to minimise my avatar's tendency to run/fall down the steps.

The upshot is that so far I have a mansion-sized home with a cottage-number of rooms, which is kind of surreal in itself. I would hope that at some point in the future I can use my experience of all the little compromises I had to make with the RL model to create an imaginative, engaging and utilitarian build that takes more advantage of the potential of SL.

My house consists of a downstairs living area, and then upstairs is my 'workshop' where I build small(ish) things in privacy

I have been without land for a while now, and find it's greatly annoying me. No place to fall back to, where you can start out venturing forth in the world. And what bugged me most was that I didn't have a place where I could build privately. So now I am building myself another home (yet again) but I know I won't use it as a place to have friends over and stuff... it will mostly be my workshop, in fact it will be centered around my sculpt studio.

I will mostly use the house to build things in and to find out about some ideas I have on construction in SL and the way I can make a house a house without having to deal with RL restraints, but without the house looking totally impossible.

So, I guess a house is for me a) a fixed point in SL which feels comfortable and b) my studio.

None of the household stuff for me though... toilets and kitchens are completely useless in SL

i need a house to sleep, to change my clothes, to raise my kids, to have an occasional birthday party, to have company.

its where we log on and off, where we have meetings.

its also one of the biggest homes in SL, so it has bragging quality also. the kids say that with in a few years our home will cover the whole island : PP (thats a joke)

home......well, its important to us because its 'home'

lizzie

Had to smile at this; yesterday I hosted an art talk and tour, done by one of the artists we are exhibiting. He wanted the attendees simply gathered around him for his talk; and he moved to various places in the gallery as he spoke. I asked him if he wanted seating for the attendees but he said no, he wanted them simply gathered round, as he was also doing a painting as he spoke.

One of the attendees got VERY upset that there was no seating provided, rezzed a cube and had an attitude all afternoon. I figured, it was the artist's presentation, so if he wanted it like that so be it. I was amused though that the one person got so upset Was his avi tired or something? Couldn't quite figure out why it was so important to him, having a seat.

I designed and built my own SL house and most of the stuff in it. So it's a sort of expression of my creativity and personality too. If someone buys an off-the-shelf house that can be an appreciation of someone else's virtual design skills.

Since SL is a virtual world, it's also a visual world, so it's only natural to want to put visible things in it. Otherewise it all boils down to that screenshot I posted earlier of a grey ball avatar on a black and white grid!

Having said that, if you don't want to own a house or land in SL, fine, nobody says you have to!

Thanks to all who responded! It's interesting to read about different motivations.

I'm glad that I am not the only one who has a home on a rather utilitarian sky platform, with a nice public garden "downstairs" on her parcel. I was beginning to think I was strange with my garden between all the stone mansions around me on the regions where I own land.

I really admire people who are able to build their own house. I wish I had enough artistic ability for that!

It is clear that most of us feel the need to a place they can call "home", even in-world we don't need sleep or nourishment.

May you all find peace and happiness in your home!