Why Your Modern Apartment Offers Comfort Ancient Kings Never Had

I spend my working days showing apartments, and I notice something about the way people judge them. We compare a home with the one next door, with the one on Instagram, with the penthouse on the floor above. We almost never compare it with how people lived for most of history — including the people who lived best.

This is a short essay about that comparison. It is not a reason to buy anything.

A palace, three hundred years ago

Picture Versailles in the time of Louis XIV, or the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul at the height of the Ottoman sultans. These were the most sophisticated residences of their age: gilded ceilings, gardens on a scale that still astonishes visitors, hundreds or thousands of servants, the finest food and craftsmanship that money and power could command.

Now think about what they could not have.

They could not cool a room on a summer afternoon beyond what shade, fountains and thick walls allowed. They could not open a tap and drink clean water without thinking about it. They could not keep food fresh for a week in a box in the kitchen. They had no washing machine, no hot shower on demand, no electric light at the flick of a switch, no anaesthetic dentistry. A letter to a relative in another country could take weeks. A king could not see his child's face from a thousand kilometres away.

I am careful here: historians argue about the details of daily life in any palace, and luxury then took forms we would still envy. But the general point holds. Comfort is made not only of space and decoration. It is made of technology that was simply not available at any price.

What an ordinary apartment in the UAE contains

An ordinary one-bedroom apartment in Abu Dhabi or Dubai today has, as standard:

• Air conditioning that makes a desert summer liveable — arguably the invention that made modern Gulf cities possible.
• Safe running water, hot and cold.
• A refrigerator and freezer, so food lasts and choice is wide.
• A washing machine — hours of labour removed every week.
• Reliable electricity and light at any hour.
• Fast internet, and with it libraries, music, films, work and education.
• A video call to family anywhere on earth, at no marginal cost.

None of the kings had any of that. Most people in this city have all of it.

Why this matters to me as a broker

It might seem odd for someone who sells property to write this. But I see a lot of anxiety around housing decisions: the fear of buying the wrong building, of not upgrading fast enough, of a neighbour's view being better. That anxiety pushes people to stretch budgets for one more bedroom or a higher floor, and sometimes to take on commitments that make life harder rather than better.

When a client is torn between a home they can comfortably afford and one that would stretch them, I sometimes ask: which of these two would a king of the eighteenth century have chosen? The answer is either. Both would have seemed miraculous. The difference between them is small next to what they already have in common.

My take

Gratitude is not a reason to stop wanting more; ambition is healthy. But it is a good antidote to the feeling that your home is never enough. If you live in an air-conditioned apartment with clean water and a fast connection, you already enjoy comforts that the most powerful people in history could not buy. Choose your next home from that position — calmly, within your means — and it will usually be a better decision. I wrote about one such conversation in why I talked a client out of a penthouse.