I Swapped Homes With A Stranger Like In ‘The Holiday’ & Here’s What I Learned About Myself

The beauty of Love Home Swap is the variety of properties available on the site. Your home could be a small apartment in New York City that seems totally blah to you — but to someone who lives elsewhere and wants the authentic New York experience, it might be perfect. On the flip side of things, their giant villa in Tuscany might be perfect for you. Both travelers can get a totally different experience without any difference in cost; the only money you pay is your annual membership fee (which starts at $11) to Love Home Swap. Once a prospective home swapper joins the website, they're prompted to list their home for other swappers to peruse. After that's done, users are able to connect with other members and start setting up home swaps.

In my case, Love Home Swap set me up to stay in a beautiful one-bedroom flat in the Little Venice neighborhood of London belonging to a woman named Jane; which, with its high ceilings, preserved crown molding, balcony, and sprawling square footage, was a far cry from the three-bedroom apartment I share with two other girls in NYC. When I say that my first walk-through of the apartment was pretty much exactly like the scene in The Holiday when Kate Winslet explores the giant Hollywood mansion she’s spending her vacation in, I’m not exaggerating: I felt like goddamn royalty. There was a balcony!

My experience didn’t start out exactly like The Holiday — which is to say, for a couple of hours, I couldn't even secure my key to Jane's flat. See, within the first few hours of landing in London, I learned the funniest thing about home swapping: much of the time, you never even meet the person you’re swapping with. In my case, upon landing at Gatwick airport in London, all I had from Jane were instructions to pick up the keys to her flat at a nearby café, and that they’d be with a man named Alberto. Simple enough, but like with many simple things, there was a rather large snag: Upon my arrival, Alberto didn’t have the keys. Since neither of us had her contact information, I was effectively stranded without a way into my flat.

So, there I was — running on a few hours of sleep after a red-eye flight, luggage in tow, wandering the streets of Little Venice to find the flat building that I didn’t have a key to. Glam. Learn from my mistakes, kids: Always make sure you have the phone number of the person you are home swapping with on hand in case there is a snafu such as this one. In my case, I managed to casually loiter outside the building (sorry, tenants I probably creeped out!) until I received a message from a Love Home Swap employee that Jane had actually left the keys with her neighbor because Alberto’s café had been closed upon her departure. (Considering it was quite early on a Saturday morning when this was all happening, bless Love, Swap, Home for looking out for me.)

Though the missing key experience wasn’t the most fun way to start out my home swap adventure, I do have to admit that it was sort of a nice intro into Jane’s daily environment. The café where the keys were originally going to be kept is somewhere that Jane clearly frequented, to the point where its owner knew her by name; and the neighbor who ultimately had the key was the woman who lived in the flat above her, whom Jane was clearly friendly with. I never met Jane or even spoke to her, and I likely never will — but even just being around people who knew her made me feel like I was truly walking in her shoes.

This feeling was only amplified once I finally got into the flat, of course. Unlike many Airbnbs I’ve stayed in, Jane’s home looked genuinely lived in — her things were in the closets, photos of her and her family lined the shelves, and there were even thriving plants on the balcony. It had a homey quality absent from hotels and Airbnbs that are clearly run by vacation home companies, and it just made me feel all the more like I was starring in my own version of The Holiday. Any moment now, a dashing Englishman would knock on my door looking for Jane, find me instead, and we’d get brunch.

The thing I found the most moving from my home swapping experience was the sheer amount of things you can learn about a person by just spending even a few hours in their home. All I had from Jane was a lovely handwritten note that she’d stuck with the key to her flat, and a booklet she kept in the kitchen for guests that included house rules and recommendations for the neighborhood. Yet, I can tell you a number of things about her:

• She’s a lawyer.
• She has children.
• She doesn’t watch a lot of television, which she herself noted in the guest booklet, but she has a smart TV that guests are welcome to try and figure out.
• She’s an avid traveler, with Lonely Planet guidebooks for Indonesia and Turkey.
• She enjoys films featuring Hugh Grant, as indicated by the fact that she has Music and Lyrics, Notting Hill, Love Actually, Bridget Jones’s Diary (two copies!), Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, and Paddington 2 on DVD.
• She does not have The Holiday on DVD, though.
• At one point, she was learning Italian, and still has the cassette tape lessons.
• Her music taste ranges from Eminem to Queen to the soundtrack for Phantom of the Opera.
• She enjoys having plants.
• We wear the same shoe size.
• She has excellent taste in tote bags:

Despite the fact I’ve never met Jane and likely never will, I feel as if I know her at least a bit simply from living in her flat, meeting her neighbors and local café owners, watering her plants, and being in her world.

Honestly, the closest I got to thinking this is it! over meeting my Jude Law happened on Day 2. I walking into the building that morning, and saw a handsome man walking down the stairs I was about to begin walking up. He did a double-take when he saw me and I smiled, because you know, flirting, and then began going upstairs — only to hear him say, “Excuse me?”

I turned around. It’s happening, I thought. “Yeah?”

Not-Jude Law smiled, before proceeding to utter the three words that ruined it all: “Are you Samantha?”

My Jude Law thought I was named Samantha. Romantic, considering my name is Tanya. End of encounter.

This was a biggie for me. When I went into this trip, I was hoping for an experience like The Holiday — and in a way, I kind of got it. Though I didn’t end up meeting my Jude Law, my two days living in Jane’s flat were the most relaxed I’d felt in a while. This realization didn’t hit me until the end of my stay, but it eventually became clear that I couldn’t feel as comfortable and relaxed in my own home as I could in Jane’s because I wasn’t offering my space the same amount of care I was offering hers.

Weirdly, it hit me when I was packing my clothes from Jane’s dresser drawer back into my suitcase — I had the absent-minded thought that the ease with which I was packing wouldn’t be possible at home because my own dresser drawer set had been broken for ages, and the drawers barely worked. As a result, an organization system in my dresser at home was nonexistent. But in Jane’s place, I kept things neat, and retrieved my clothes with ease. After all, I was a guest in Jane’s flat — why wouldn’t I make every effort I could to keep things neat? I made sure to water her plants, keep things sparkling clean, make sure the bed and linens were perfectly made every day, etc. In my own space at home, I let things get chaotic, with the excuse that I was so busy with work and my social life that I didn’t have time to organize and keep things tidy. And it was, subconsciously, stressing me out. I had no excuse to not treat my own space as if I were a guest there as well; after all, we’re all our own guests when we’re at home.

Upon returning home, I made a point to be better about getting my room in order. I finally got rid of that broken dresser in my room and invested in a better one that actually works; I rearranged my furniture to maximize the amount of space in my room, eliminating the clutter; I donated all my old clothes I didn’t wear anymore; I even wallpapered one of the walls in my room to give it a happier, brighter vibe.

And it worked. I still feel that sense of relaxation I felt at Jane’s home, except now, I do in my own room. I know it sounds strange that a home swap experience is responsible for this, but one of the most beautiful things about travel is that we often take home a lot more than just souvenirs and memories.

Overall, home swapping is something I would recommend anyone try; you may not find your soulmate like Cameron Diaz in The Holiday, but I guarantee you will find out more about yourself than you expected. And, no disrespect to Jude Law, but that’s worth way more than him any day.