Your Ideal Home in Costa Rica and What To Look For

Certain factors must be taken into account when creating living areas that are flexible and adaptable to your family’s needs

Whether in the mountains, beach or city, an apartment, condo, gated community or independent house; whether it is large or small; rustic or elegant; traditional or contemporary; with or without gardensà everyone has their ideal home and everyone wants it to be functional and well suited to the needs and expectations of the family who will live in it.

It should be attractive, suit individual taste, be safe and preferably have easy access.

Access



The option of enjoying the countryside full time in Costa Rica, far from the city is only available to a minority who can work or study via Internet thus letting them work from home, or to retirees.

However, the majority of people working in the city have children in school, college or university and need to be close to hospitals, supermarkets and other conveniences so that their lives must revolve around the metropolitan district.

Having the house close to where you work factors in your time, convenience and finances. However pretty the house and area where it is located, if you have to commute over an hour to work and back, that is time taken from enjoying your family and being able to relax as well as going through all the stress commuting involves during the day.

In this way, not only freedom of movement but also one’s social life is affected if your home is far away from the main urban centers.

Security



Ironically, in Costa Rica, it is the honest folk who live behind bars while the thieves move freely about the streets. Fear of theft has made metal bars, alarm systems, guard dogs, high boundary walls, razor wire and protected gated communities more popular.

This introverted kind of living increasingly isolates a person, segregating them from society.

It’s almost like going back in time to the Medieval era with its defensive architecture that as well as creating places of difficult access also surrounded the settlement with impenetrable walls with a variety of external and internal barriers from perimeter ditches to interior mazes.

There are many ways to guarantee safety without getting rid of your front garden or direct access to public places and they also give a more amenable aspect to the city and help encourage social interaction.

Functionality



It is a big mistake to underestimate the importance of how functional a home must be for its residents and its lack can cost you a happy family life. The psychology of human behavior with respect to space has shown that some house designs help bring the family together whilst others can lead to divorce and conflict.

One of the main aims to achieving an optimum living environment is to satisfy the family’s needs by organizing the rooms and living areas well and adapting the home to the demands of the climate. A wise choice of materials will also help lessen maintenance costs to the building.

Needs change with time. The importance originally placed on passageways surrounding the house may give way to space for the kitchen and dining room.

Before, you might have needed at least one maid’s room with bathroom but this feature is tending to disappear, or is being turned into an area that can be adapted to an office or games room.

The double garage, that at times can be indispensable is also a huge waste of space and should now double up as a social area for large parties, or a playroom for children.

The formal receptions rooms for “important guests” and dining rooms that took up at least a quarter of the house but were only used three times a year have given way to family areas with a better integration of social areas with the kitchen.

To summarise, quality of life is not only associated with the location of the house, but also with how functional it manages to be.

When it comes to design, you should be flexible about the distribution of the rooms to foresee any changes or extensions or divisions as the family grows or leaves home.

Satisfaction



The ideal home takes as many shapes and forms as there are human ideas.

The Arabs are traditionally used to smaller rooms that come from the small tents they used in the middle of huge desert lands. For Americans who have an enormous country, their dream comes in the form of a large house surrounded by gardens in a suburban neighborhood.

The Costa Ricans are an interesting hybrid, unlike other ex-colonial hispanics, who found it hard to come out of the mountains and into the city.

Ticos link their properties with the land itself and it has been hard for them to assimilate the concept of high-rise condominiums that are becoming increasingly popular.

However, that need for one’s own “yard” or garden does not imply a love of nature because when it is being built, no harm is seen in felling trees or situating the patio facing away from the mountains.

Attraction



Of course, tastes change but as in every artistic discipline there are parameters that guarantee harmony, guiding the concepts of shape, form, space, volume, balance, proportion, scale, contrast, color, light, etc which any good architect knows how to adapt to the tastes of the client and every bad designer knows to ignore when trying to market the building.

When speaking of architecture, the natural or constructed surroundings are key to aesthetics. In spite of being a sister to the Fine Arts, architecture, as opposed to painting or sculpture, should not be designed or judged in isolation because it forms part of a contextual whole.

For example, a Venetian palace looks beautiful by the canals of that wonderful Italian city but it would look ridiculous in San Jos+¬; rather like trying to insert a diamond into the ring used to open beer bottles.

In the same way, we see that in the splendid countryside of the Central Valley, a dumb cement “shoe box” is built facing away from the soft irregular beauty of the mountains, or a “glass box” that ignores our tropical climate. Some insist on ignoring the general wisdom to follow a fashion that in itself is only temporary.

The style wars were won over a century ago; however, the metropolitan area still today seems a battle field with several warring factions whose only common value is bad taste, selling cheap architecture at high cost.

Unfortunately, there is much spiritual poverty between what is offered on a mass scale and the bubbling source of talent and creativity of a handful of architects that like the crystal clear streams flow away down the side gullies, but that sooner or later will be recognised and acknowledged by the people.

Just remember that it is ‘at home’ where you spend most of your life.

Our thanks to Kathy MacDonaldand our friends at La Nación – Costa Rica’s largest Spanish circulation newspaper for their permission to use this article.

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Andrew Makarik

to@welovecostarica.com

Andrew Makarik is the main editor of WeLoveCostaRica, a fan of this sunny country. He is also a loving husband and a has a lovely daughter. By being a devoted family man and the biggest Costa Rica fan, he wants to make more people feel at home there. WeLoveCostaRica unites people and helps them find new home or a new travel destination. This website is a friendly community where everyone can find not only information, but also new friends and travel pals. Andrew is also passionate about IT and programming, so he himself maintains a friendly atmosphere in this cozy environment of WeLoveCostaRica.com.