We have slept in all of them

This started with a house in Chikmagalur that had eleven photographs online and one working bathroom. Nothing in the listing was false. A wide lens, a clear morning and a careful crop had simply done the work that a sentence should have done.

So we began doing it the other way round. We stay in a house first. We photograph it ourselves, on an ordinary day, with the weather it actually had. Then we write down what the listing would have left out — the geyser that takes fifteen minutes, the last four hundred metres that need a high-clearance car, the room that gets the road noise.

None of that stops people booking. It stops them arriving disappointed, which is a different thing and matters more. A guest who knew about the geyser is not annoyed by the geyser.

We keep the list short because we cannot vouch for a house we have not slept in. Eleven is roughly the number two people can genuinely keep up with, and when we add one it is because we went there, not because an owner sent photographs.