Finding Home #author Lucinda Hartley

Finding Home: A guide to choosing a property that fits the life you want to live.

Whether you’re ready to buy a home or just exploring your options, this book will help you cut through the chaos and make home-buying decisions that support your lifestyle and well-being.

Keeping the dream of home ownership alive for first-home buyers, renters, side-hustlers and anyone with a modern career who wants a home that fits their lifestyle.

Most conventional home-buying advice is outdated. The idea that if you work hard and save, you can buy a home and be financially secure no longer applies. With skyrocketing house prices and cost-of-living pressures, buying your first home can feel overwhelming, even impossible. But there is another way. Finding Home offers a fresh, empowering approach to choosing where to live and how to buy – on your terms.

Written by urban designer and tech entrepreneur Lucinda Hartley – who has spent two decades shaping cities and neighbourhoods around the world – this book blends practical tools, evidence-based insights and real-life stories to help you make confident housing choices. You’ll learn how to align your home with your values, lifestyle, and neighbourhood, while navigating trade-offs, finance options and the buying process.

Having lived in more than ten countries – and twice as many homes – Lucinda also brings a personal lens to the complexities and trade-offs of finding a home.

To connect with Lucinda ...
https://www.lucindahartley.com/findinghome
https://www.instagram.com/housingwithlucinda/
https://www.youtube.com/@UCfxdUFlIPcv1fFaOVC6Kq7A

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

It's good afternoon, Lucinda Hartley. Welcome to Yellow Shelf. Joe, thanks so much for having me. Oh, my pleasure. Congratulations. Your book is available now for pre-order, but it's out super soon.

SPEAKER_01 0:14

Yeah, actually, just out as a part of this week. So it's now available in stores, Finding Home.

SPEAKER_00 0:20

Finding home. And I'm just going to quickly share. I've just moved house. So this book is was for me, was for anyone thinking. So I've really enjoyed diving into it. Lisinda, tell us all about it.

SPEAKER_01 0:34

So Finding Home is a book that really helps you work through all of the big life questions that you need to ask when you're choosing what to buy and where to live. So whether you're a first-home buyer trying to think about the impossible challenge of getting into the market, or maybe you are more established and you're looking to move house, or you may be like me facing a life change after a separation and be really confused by the overwhelming picture of the housing market. Because so much of our thought process around housing is about how much can I borrow? What's my financial situation? And that's critical. And the book covers that. But there's also so many other questions: your well-being, your relationships, your community, your family, your schooling. All of this comes into how you make this a decision about a house. But there really just isn't a lot of good advice out there about how to make those decisions.

SPEAKER_00 1:21

Yeah. And like I mentioned, you know, I, many others, and yourself, you have circumstances that arise where you need to consider different. You need to consider, you know, uh, you know, other circumstances, like you said, children, schooling, you know, separation, um, family matters. Like there's so much to this that you often don't know where to go to get the information or to to learn where to be okay with I guess your concerns. And that's lovely. One of the loveliest things about your book, it it's a really warm read that you feel like, wow, I didn't even know I needed to know this. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:02

Actually, I think this is part of what prompted me to write the book. Having spent my career in urban design and designing housing projects around the world, I guess I have an up-close view of the mechanics of housing, like what goes into creating it, to financing it, to designing neighborhoods. And the more people I was speaking to, it's like lots of those factors are invisible. But we implicitly know it. You know, if you're in a good neighborhood with a good vibe, you know it. And if you move somewhere where there isn't much sense of community, you know it. So the goal of the book is like, how do you know those things before you move or before you make the biggest financial decision of your life often? And the book doesn't tell you a right or wrong because you know the housing that's right for you is different from the housing that's right for me, but it does give you a framework for to know the questions that you should ask and the decisions that you should make.

SPEAKER_00 2:50

Yeah. And Lucinda, you mentioned your work, urban designer, you know, future planning of spaces all around the world. Um, you're also a keynote speaker, like now you're an author. Do you want to tell us a little bit about you? Summarize what you want to share with the audience and the writing process.

SPEAKER_01 3:09

Yeah, sure. So I grew up living in six different countries. I've now lived in ten. My parents were academics, and I guess back in that in the 90s when there weren't really cheap airfares, the most logical thing seemed to be to move the family around. Uh, and I mentioned that only because living in a lot of different places gave me, I guess, an outsider's view of housing and what home really means. Because I, especially in Australia and in many countries, you know, we have this attachment of the Great Australian dream. It's the same with the great American dream, this idea that kind of your house is synonymous with your status, your family, your life. I never really had that because I lived in so many different places. And to me, home was always where I am rather than the building I was in. And so that really gave me a perspective into different kinds of cities. And I became an urban designer because I was curious about the different ways that we lived and how did we design different ways to live? Uh, but that led me on a much wider journey into working with the United Nations on the sustainable development goals for cities to designing like city-shaping projects with organizations like Google or the FIFA um or the FIFA organization with the World Cup. And uh and also a range of technology products. So I worked on a big data startup uh which we sold last year, and I'm now working on a fintech like a home loan product. So looking at that cities from a lot of different perspectives, but I guess you know, from the book's perspective, it's all of those experiences, I think, have given me a slightly outsider's view into Australia's property obsession. And how do we unpack that narrative that we're told that you're only a successful adult if you've got the picket fence? Because actually, not everyone even wants that.

SPEAKER_00 4:52

Yeah. And Lucinda, you know, I mean, I grew up in middle working class Australia, so I got that narrative growing up. I went and lived in another country and saw differently how communities live, you know, and I experienced that for a number of years. So yeah, I've kind of had to almost recondition over the years the way I feel about home and you know, status, like you said, the picket fence, like what's ideal, what's ideal for me and what's ideal for the family. Um, it's it's something that, you know, we almost have a pressure. There's almost like this pressure on humans, and we need to let that go.

SPEAKER_01 5:33

Yeah, I think it's really curious when you look at the Australian housing market, because actually most other countries don't live the way that we do. Like it isn't actually uh most people I would say would aspire to own property of some description, but this idea that you need to own the house with the backyard, maybe a hills hoist, is a uniquely Australian view. And it's actually a vision of housing that comes from the 1950s and 60s policy. And one of the points that I make in the book or challenge is that every aspect of our life is different. Like if you look at your grandparents' generation and how they lived, you know, the way we work is different, particularly for women, uh, the way that we live. We move around, we travel, the way we communicate, use technology, our relationship status, the way that we parent, have families, blended families, all these things. It is completely different from the 1950s and 60s. Yet somehow we expect our housing to be exactly the same. And why don't we evolve our mindset of what housing can be? And if you look at examples around the world, look at Singapore, look at Paris, look at Copenhagen, look at New York City. I don't look at people living there and think they're having a horrible life because they're living in an apartment. Um, they're actually having a very different kind of life, but still a very fulfilling one. And if we really want to be serious about solving housing affordability in Australia, yes, absolutely we need to deal with the cost of housing. And I write a lot about that. Yes. But we also need to be bold enough to imagine that our housing future may be different from the one that we grew up with. And I think that's really challenging for a lot of people.

SPEAKER_00 7:05

Yeah. And I think you're right. And I but I think what you you mentioned, your book does so well, curiosity of what it could look like differently. And I think that's one of the the really powerful things about your book. Lucinda, do you want to tell us if we're watching anywhere in the world, because this is really interesting, this is a really interesting read for anyone. Tell us how we connect with you with the book. I know you've got a fabulous website, uh, Instagram, but you point us in the direction and I'll put it in the show notes.

SPEAKER_01 7:34

Amazing. You can follow me anywhere online, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok. It's housing at at housing with Lucinda. Yes. Uh, and my website, lucindahartley.com. There's lots of book resources there. Uh the book itself uh is out on my blurry screen. Um, so you can buy that online, Amazon Booktopia, with the publisher Major Street or all good bookstores in Australia. Yes. Um, and would love to know what you think.

SPEAKER_00 8:01

Uh that's my always what I ask the audience. Get the book, send Lucinda a message about some feedback on the book. Congratulations, Lucinda. Thanks for joining us. Pleasure. Thanks, Joe. Cheers.