A guesthouse by any other name

I bet we all think about something different when we hear the word ‘home’. For some, ‘home’ is just the word for wherever you lay your head at night. Maybe for you, it will always be somewhere in the past – your hometown, your childhood bedroom, the swing-set at your grandparents’ house. Home can be a place with four walls and a roof, but it can also be a feeling.

Likewise, I’d guess we all think different things when we hear words like ‘travel’, ‘flatshare’, or ‘community’. Far from having concrete, unbiased definitions, certain words become so tangled up with our own experiences we can scarcely understand them independent from ourselves.

When Mason & Fifth first launched, the dream was to create a unique version of ‘home’ – a kind of co-living, co-creating space that provided people with more than just a place to lay their heads at night. Over time, flexibility has become more and more important – just like at work, people are looking for solutions of how to live more flexibly, so the offering evolved from only long-term stays to enabling people to stay for as long or short as they like. When faced with the question of how to describe what a Mason & Fifth building is now, all available words seem to come up short. Phrases like ‘hybrid hospitality’ might technically come close, but totally fall short at describing the emotional experience.

The word ‘guesthouse’ comes closest to describing the more free-wheeling model that has emerged, with guests staying anywhere from one night to, well, indefinitely. But what kind of legacy are we inheriting from all the guesthouses that come before us?  “Some of the older generations may have negative associations with the word,  conjuring up images of faded seaside B&Bs”, Ben, Mason & Fifth founder says. “But younger generations seem more likely to associate the term with places they have stayed travelling and seem to have a broader perspective of what the term could refer to.”

What do you call something that isn’t a hotel, isn’t a home, isn’t a serviced apartment? What name should we pick for something that’s kind of option D (all of the above) and E (none of the above) at the same time? There’s an argument to be made for avoiding something that carries etymological baggage; but on the other hand, maybe taking all that history and remodelling it into something entirely new is actually more fun.

To pare it down to the bones, ‘guesthouse’ historically refers to a more affordable alternative to mainstream hotels and the owner or manager often lives on or adjacent to the property. Ryokans – traditional Japanese inns – have existed since the eighth century, and guesthouses and inns have appeared in many cultures throughout history, either as the only accommodation for miles or a place available to visitors who have no local relatives or friends to stay with.

This lends itself to ambiguity: hostels and hotels are implicitly designed for short stays, but guesthouses are more slippery. You can imagine a weary traveller checking in late at night and checking out again before dawn, and you can imagine someone arriving with no concrete plans for moving on, where their room – and any communal spaces – become their home indefinitely. Any way you spin it, the word ‘guesthouse’ carries a lot of weight, describing places that meet the emotional and material needs of visitors beyond what we expect from hotels, motels, and B&Bs.

We’ve decided to lean into the word ‘guesthouse’ at Mason & Fifth, knowing it might mean wildly different things to each person who stumbles upon it, not in spite of the ambiguity, but because of it.

If the word brings to mind boutique hotels in Southern Europe with spectacular views? Great. If it conjures up a driftwood-and-salt seaside property with a maze of corridors and rickety staircases? Also great. And if it makes you think of Victorian-era common lodging houses… well, we can pretty much guarantee you’ll be pleasantly surprised. Each of these images is less about a real place and more about the kind of experience you imagine yourself having there, after all. And while none of them actually describes a Mason & Fifth building, the feeling of possibility, adventure, or escapism that these images conjure up does ring true.

While some guests make a whistle-stop visit as part of a longer travelling adventure, proclaiming to feel ‘right at home’ for the night, others become regulars returning time and again, treating Mason & Fifth buildings as their ‘second home’ in London. And for others, it actually is their permanent home, either for a long while or just a little while. The word we use to describe the spaces where these experiences happen matters far less than the way it makes people feel, of course. But that being said, if a guesthouse is a place where you can both drop in for a sense of community for a night, and also find a more permanent sense of belonging, then the prevailing feeling seems to be that ‘guesthouse’ is exactly the right word.