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We are closing on a house this week (yay!), and it really sucked — I mean the whole process. Every time I’ve been in the house, I feel like I still can’t get attached to it, and it doesn’t actually feel like it is going to be OURS.So, I am thinking of naming my house. Has anyone else named their house? Is this too antiquated, or will I confuse folks? Or are we bringing the funk to the suburbs? (Good Rick James funk, not gross funk.) -Bethany
After returning from a trip to the American south, and falling in love with the tradition of home-naming, my best friend’s mom, Meg, decided to name her house. A little while later, Meg came up with “Conejo Cottage” — an apt name, since they have a lot of pet rabbits that live there.
Although, when asking her for a photo of her home name plaque, Meg told me that she’s changing the name of the house to “Duckington” since there are more ducks than rabbits now… AND it was the name of the estate where her mother was born on the Chesapeake Bay.
Although, I think the more modern-day version of house-naming is to come up with a location tag on Instagram. My favorite modern home names: “Chateau du Fatty Bandits,” “BooMilk’s Pleasure Nest,” my parents’ home in Maui that we’ve named “The Shack,” and my cousin’s home in Maui called “The Moocher’s Hotel.”
All this to say, from England to the American South, and now in the heart of Los Angeles and the Hawaiian islands, people have and do continue to name their homes.
Have you named yours? What do you call your pad?
My house in college was unofficially named Super Best Friends’ House of Naked Cooking and Crazy Dancing. It mainly came about through many different inside jokes. When my current partner and I moved in together we named our apartment Fort Stegosaurus after an actual blanket fort we built when we were dating. Our current place is called Underwood, which is a reference to the Wildwood books. We moved to Portland and it’s a basement apartment, so it seemed fitting.
I love having names for my homes. It makes it feel like they have more of a personality of their own, and I like that.
This question got me leaping out of bed and running to something with a proper keyboard to answer.
My social group and myself take house-naming very seriously. On our street alone, we have The Burrow, The Hive, and Mondegreen (our house). In the surrounding streets, there’s The Mausoleum (understandably populated by goths), The Cellar (home to some wine connoisseurs), House of Knives (gamers with an impressive collection of props), and the Eyrie (high up on a hill).
Us Mondegreen residents took a few weeks after moving in to choose a name. Verona was a contender (to acknowledge our proximity to The Burrow, “Two households, both alike in dignity…”), but we wanted our house to have a name that stood on its own. Finally, one housemate suggested Mondegreen. The houses’ walls are all a different shade of green, plus the word itself refers to word-play (which we do a lot of). I also like that “monde” is the French word for “world” – our little green world.
Naming a house makes it easier to refer to (instead of “Sebastian and Sophie and Abigail’s house”) and also makes it easier to make a connection with the house itself and the housemates within it. Last year, we received Christmas presents addressed to “Mondegreen”, which makes us feel more like a family. Plus, you get to feel as though you’re in Westeros; “I, of House Mondegreen, do extend an invitation to you!”
Sure. My folks used to jokingly refer to our family as the Mayhems because there were four rambunctious kids and they are both absentminded. We are mostly grown now. Some of us in our own places some still at home, which is a rather large and rambling place due to years of additions and basement finishing. So we call it Mayhem Manor. We also call my sister and brother-in-laws place the Cat Cottage. My house doesn’t have a family name but my partner and I call it The Refuge or The Hobbit Hole.
We refer to our house as “Astrid’s House.” Astrid is our daughter, and we closed on the house 2 weeks before she was born. I like to call it that because the drifter in me hates the idea of owning property. By calling it hers, I can pretend that I’m not shackled to this place 😛
Although I’ve never owned a home, I like to name the places where I live. Evite still remembers them all whenever I create an event. We now live in a bright orange building with cool other trim colors. When we moved in, my friend said, “OMG you live in THAT building? I have such a crush on that building!” So we were considering calling it Orange Crush, and then – I shit you not – our landlord actually, and completely randomly, brought us a bottle of orange soda. So after that, we couldn’t NOT call our place Orange Crush! 😀
Many of the places I’ve lived (there have been many) were christened with names….” The Mini-mansion”, “The Cunt-ry Club”,”The Holler”, “P’s Home for Lost Boys & Wayward Girls”, even had “The Money Pit”. Our current rental has stumped me. It is the first place my new hubby & I rented together. A painted brick rancher built (& last updated) in 1955 on a huge lot in my favorite neighborhood. We’ve been here a year & still no name. However, in a neighborhood saturated with family wi-fi networks, ours is named “FBI Surveillance Van”. Gotta maintain a little rebel status. Lol.
My parent’s house is in Wyuna Bay, and has this little shed thing out the back that looks like an oldschool railway station (bench and all). We found a couple of old railway lanterns in a second-hand store, and called the house “Wyuna Station”.
I love the naming houses tradition. Ours is informally called “The Ski Lodge”. Although we live somewhere there is never snow, the lounge/kitchen open plan area has these huge A-line wooden ceilings. The first time we went there, my husband said “Geez! It’s like a ski lodge in here!” The name stuck!
Our house is called Smurfboat because of the weird front deck it had on it and the very bright blue color. We also own a condo (first “house”) and it’s helpful to have a name for things in our internal documents (we have not yet named Smurfboat in our tax documents but in our Google docs, it’s nice to differentiate).
My college friends named every room they lived in from freshman year to post-college: The Vault, The Shaft, (one I’m forgetting), and The Loft.
I’ve only owned two cars, but they’ve both been named: Buford and Tequila.
My husband and I can’t afford a starter house just yet (hoping to buy next year), but we have already planned out what we want for décor, amenities, land, etc: small house in the boonies, close enough to both of our jobs, but with enough space for a large dog. We’re still deciding on the future name: it’s a toss-up between Fort Kickass and Castle Greyskull.
My husband inherited his father’s family’s summer home back in the 80s and they had named it in the 1900s. It was called “Hill and Dale” but I assume that was considered fairly normal back then. Our house is named “Rosemary Cottage.” My husband’s ex-wife named it that because lots of rosemary grew wild here I guess. I think it’s kind of cool to name a house. I mean, why not?!
My husband and I bought a big grey duplex with my sister and her fiance. We started referring to it as the “Family Compound” and now it’s just “The Compound”. When my husband and my sister’s fiance post about their mutual Final Fantasy run through on Tumblr they tag it, “Compound Gaming”. It’s really the only house name that’s ever stuck.
My girlfriend’s apartment senior year of college was the Rainbow Chateau, because it was her, our friend who is gay, and our other friend who though straight is a very fierce ally. They hosted a lot of get-togethers with our mostly LGBTQ friend group. My apartment was the Lesbian Love Shack, even though it was again a mixed group of queer and straight people living there. Our roommate didn’t mind, and his girlfriend thought it was cute.
We haven’t named our new apartment yet, but we’re working on it. I’ve always loved the idea of naming your home, whether it is something fun or something serious. My aunt and uncle live in a town on the ocean in Rhode Island, about a 1/2 hour from Newport, and all of the big houses in their town and in Newport have names.
We like to name all the things! Our current house is in an older part of the city and thus surrounded by large trees, so we call it the Treehouse. Our cars are named Sophie and Timmy. My dad’s current house is named The Rose, but the last one was referred to as The Clover Hut since it was green and bought on St. Patrick’s Day.
My ex-boyfriend had this really gorgeous lofty appartment in an old barn, all the insides were designed and made by him and it was really a cool, gothy kind of place and he called it “Valhal”. i think it is a nice thing to think of your home as some kind of mythical place where you belong 🙂
I currently live in an apartment and want to get out. So giving a name isn’t something I am interested in.
But my boss recently bought a new house, and didn’t sell her old one right away so she could make major renovations in the new one. So she got into the habit of talking about the houses by their numbers. Okay so it isn’t really clever naming system, but that was the name “Where are you going today? 24?” “I have someone stopping by 13 so I will be in later tomorrow morning.” It was just something that occurred naturally.
We named out property because my husband has dreams of making it a hobby farm. We had one little white hen who kept sneaking into the garage while we were doing construction on the house. We ended up naming the place Sneaky Chicken Farm.
Our house in college was named The Funky Bungalow.
teddybErin we also call our home pride rock! We live at the top of a hill that looks out quite a ways and when we first moved in my hubby took the kitty and held him up quoted the movie and it was set from there on.
It’s less common in my circles _not_ to name your house or apartment, regardless of whether you rent or own. Our house is Equinox; our downstairs neighbors have kept the same household name through three different locations but now they append “Equinox branch”.
Yes! More house names! We came up with our house name before we even made an offer on the house. We call our abode “Hoff Haus” after the street and David Hasselhoff. About a month after we moved in, a friend gave us a cross-stitch she made that says “Don’t Hassle the Hoff Haus” 😀
On of my favorite book series, “Wraeththu”, had a house with a huge presence- the sign above the house “We Dwell in Forever” I LOVE IT. I’ll name my house someday too!
My friend and I are living in the same apartment complex, so we decided to be dorks about it. Her apartment is called The Dope-nshire and my apartment is called Swag End. Yeah, it’s dumb but that just makes it all the funnier to me. 🙂
Also my friend’s older brother shared a huge house with a bunch of roommates and they called it The Rainbow Connection which is an amazing name for a place.
Our house was empty for ten years before we bought it, but before that there was a guy who lived his entire house in that cottage – him and all his siblings grew up there, and everyone moved out but him (don’t get me started about buying a house technically owned by 8 people). He was really well known in the village, and loads of our friends remember visiting him when they were kids.
So our house has forever been “Murphy’s”, and there doesn’t seem to be anything we can do about it! Even my husband says “I’m going to Murphy’s!”
i name EVERYTHING.
house: almost wonderland
robot tattoos: gene and anita (pin up girl is beth, sheep is nina)
car: betty (betty rubble)
head navigator (the octopus hanging from my rear-view mirror): bruce (mostly because if i get lost i can yell at him for pointing the wrong direction…8 legs, a few of them are wrong. DAMMIT BRUCE).
head flamingo: Frank
my kids think i’m nuts but i’ll never stop doing it (i named them and it turned out ok). referring to items by name stands out and is usually a fun conversation starter- one coffee shop i go to the girls always ask how bruce is doing, the guy at starbucks always asks how gene is doing. i knew a guy once that named all his furniture (his bed was named erica).
I name all kinds of inanimate objects, including my car, phone, computer, and house. My house is called Rose Haven, and I have a plaque made by my very best friend on the front door. I have 8 rosebushes; 4 red and 4 pink, in memory of my husband and also my best friend.