Describe a home that you like to visit but would not want to live in

I'd like to talk about my friend Vy's family home, a traditional tube house on Hang Bac street in the Old Quarter of Hanoi. Her family has lived there for four generations, and I've been dropping in regularly since we met at university five years ago. From the street it looks tiny, barely three metres wide, with her mother's silver shop at the front. But once you squeeze past the counter it goes back nearly forty metres, through a dim corridor, a little courtyard with a starfruit tree, and then a steep wooden staircase up to the rooms where nine people live. I adore visiting. The courtyard is somehow cool even in July, her grandmother always produces lotus tea and candied ginger, and there's an altar room upstairs with black-and-white photographs going back to the 1930s. It feels like stepping into a version of Hanoi that has almost disappeared. Living there, however, would be another matter entirely. There's one bathroom for the whole family, and Vy says the morning queue is 'a daily political negotiation'. The walls are thin, so everybody knows everybody's business, and tourists wander into the shop from eight in the morning until ten at night. On top of that, the street floods up to the ankle after heavy rain, and the house is so dark in the middle that the lights stay on all day. I'm someone who needs silence and a door I can shut, so I think I'd last about a week. Still, I envy the sense of history she has. My own flat is bright, quiet and completely forgettable, and nobody's great-grandfather ever sold silver in it.