The Red House It they may ask me, what a luxury house is for me? Any house should be a palace for its owners. And a palace, nothing more than a house with some privilege. Sometimes, the privilege is the view of a mountain range, the sea, or a group of trees. Other times the privilege is having the morning sun enter through your window, or the silent neighborhood that allows you to rest, or the darkness of the night that lets you see the stars; or a friendly neighborhood full of children playing freely in the street, or the proximity of a square, the children’s school, or your daily workplace. The generous space full of corners may be a privilege of those kind that my mother used to find useless, the high ceilings of old houses or schools, where one wanders when distracted, the wooden planks of floor and stairs, that creak with footsteps or heat changes, the rain that hums on the wooden tiles, as Neruda says, “with his violin language”. Perhaps, gloomy silent spaces are a luxury, almost bare of furniture, inspired somehow in the architecture of pre-Columbian America, like the outdoor rooms of Chan-Chan’s palace in Peru, or the ball game halls of Chichen Itza or Uxmal in those Mexico Mayan cities, or the town squares of such small towns as Caspana, Toconce or Ayquina, in the Chilean northern highlands. Even if you can’t live for the moment in such a house, just imagining its interior is a pleasure, that invites you to day dream beyond, having more and more things, and bigger ones. Sometimes is better to make the best with less.