Consuming work/productive leisure: the consumption patterns of second home environments

Abstract

This paper, based on a research project on British second home owners in rural France, uses empirical evidence derived from ethnographic interviews to investigate and analyse the escapism opportunities afforded by the purchase and consumption of a second home in a foreign environment. Escape is the main theme, from pressure of work, everyday routine, from commodification, to a space which is a bolt-hole, a retreat or a genuine break from paramount reality. The actions and activities through which the escape is attempted or effected are examined, leading to some insights into the home-holiday as well as the production-consumption relationship. It seems that the French second home experience provides an example of an alternative to the routines and constraints of the world of work on the one hand and from commodified tourism products on the other. In committing to the project, which mingles production and consumption, owners believe they are achieving a balance which is missing from their lives in Britain, through the mechanism of having a recurrent escape route to a way of life which offers them a degree of permanence. The French house project is also an identity project, in which reflexivity plays an important role. The practice, for those who succeed at it, ultimately can be seen as a form of social and spatial delinquency, breaking through the boundaries of a commodified existence to the lived space of another life.