You could call us the ultimate downsizers.
Until a few years ago, my wife Janet and I had three homes — in London, Suffolk and Tuscany. We spent years refurbishing them, furnishing them and (importantly) enjoying them. But as I inched further into my seventies, we felt an increasing desire to simplify.
First, we realised that we were no longer enjoying our Tuscan home as much as we had before. We were spending so much of each summer in Tuscany, we weren’t seeing anywhere else. As we didn’t wish to have a European home which we visited rarely — we knew too many people for whom this had become true — we decided to sell our home in Montalcino. Surprisingly, this proved painless. Overwhelmingly, we felt relief.