How to talk about and describe a home

This lesson will be useful if you have to rent, buy or simply describe a place (house, apartment, etc.). You must remember 3 verbs: Estar/Ser/Tener and some possessive pronouns. First, you should know that in Spanish we divide places into “ambiences”. The living room and the bedrooms are considered “environments”. So, if a house has a living room, 2 bedrooms, a kitchen and 2 bathrooms, this house has 3 rooms. A place with only one room is called an studio apartment.

We classify different types of properties into departments (apartments), flats (flats) and houses (houses).

A property can BE (A property can be…)
Modern (Modern)
Classic/Ancient (Classic/Ancient)
Spacious (Spacious)
Luminous (Light)
dark (dark)
Warm (Hot)
cold (cold)
Expensive/Not very expensive (Expensive/Not very expensive)
Cheap (Cheap)

A property can BE (A property can be…)
Furnished (furnished)
Unfurnished (unfurnished).
Well communicated (Well communicated)
Close to…(Near/near something)
Far from the center (far from the center)
In the city (In the city)
In the suburbs (In the suburbs)
In a quiet/noisy/quiet area (In a quiet/noisy/quiet area)

A property can HAVE (A property can to have…)
yard (yard)
Balcony (Balcony)
Bathroom/s (Bathroom)
Individual or shared kitchen (Individual kitchen or a part of another room, for example, connected to the living room)
garage (garage)
Pool (Pool)

Where does your house face? (Where is your house?) *Note that this is a non-literal translation
Face the street (Face the street)
Facing the quiet part of the building (facing a wall of another building)
Facing the sea (It is in front of the sea)

Remember that you can use possessive pronouns to start conversations about places.
Mine (Mine)
Yours (Yours)
Yours (theirs)
Our (Our)
Yours (theirs)

In order not to repeat the same word twice, we can use an article (feminine, masculine, singular or plural) depending on what we are talking about, and the possessive pronoun.
For example:

My house is central. (My house is located in the center)
Mine is on the outskirts. (Mine is in the suburbs.)
Our apartment is warm, but yours is cold. (Our apartment is warm, but his is cold.)
My house has a pool, and yours? (My house has a pool, and yours?)

To express the arrangement of furniture in the house, you can use:

under (de) (under)
Above (of) (Above)
Behind (of) (behind)
In front of (of) (in front of)
between (between)
To the right (of) (To the right)
To the left (of) (To the left)
Beside (of) (Next to)
In the center (of) (In the center)

Describing a house is commonplace in any language, so we hope this lesson will give you some great tools to use. Whether you’re renting an apartment in a Spanish-speaking country, describing your apartment to your Spanish-speaking friend, knowing the right ways to talk about houses will go a long way.