Ta’ Xbiex may seem like an unlikely place of departure for a piece on huts and basic dwellings. Except that walking there the other day I came across an Italian family who had parked their camper van right on the front. Old and shabby, it didn’t quite tally with the stand of seafront villas from Malta’s grande bellezza.

Certainly there was something about the socks draped over the toaster that made the houses look soulless and forlorn. Still, it did make me wonder why people feel the need to leave the comfort of their homes to slum it out in tiny compartments.

Summer in Malta is probably better located than Ta’ Xbiex for one to think about it. The number of huts and shanties and boathouses and other contraptions that mushroom along the coast is jaw-dropping.

At the White Rocks saltpans, for example, two or three extended families show up every August and spend several days camped out under a patchwork of old bed linen. Let’s just say that pleasure between the sheets means different things to different people.

The saltpans type are what we might call kutcha (makeshift dwellings), to borrow a word from Hindi. The ‘campsite’ up the road would be the pukka (more permanent and durable) variety. Arguments from environmental impact apart, the principle is probably the same.

There’s nothing endemic about it. One Swedish professor who I happen to know makes it a point to circulate an e-mail every summer telling us he is staying in his hut ‘without regular access to the internet’. The Swiss love their lakeside huts. The BBC once ran a photo-essay on vacation cabins in Russia. And so on.

There is a certain primordial pleasure to living temporarily in a basic space. It is also quite literally a childlike one. Those of us who have watched children play will know nothing keeps them quieter than a few old sheets and clothes pegs. No matter how many elaborate toys they might have, children like nothing better than to cobble together a tent (“nilgħabu tal-kamp”).

Tree houses, pre-fab ‘Swiss chalets’, and such, are variations on a theme. Location does matter and gardens are greatly preferred. Still, pitching a tent in the middle of the living room will do for children who grow up in homes where space is in short supply. They will proceed to furnish it with their favourite books and toys. Relations with the local government permitting, they will also take their meals and sleep there.

I suppose part of it is about domesticity and the making of one’s own living space. But it is also about a place that is not one’s usual, and which is attractive precisely because it is basic. That’s also why the tent phase only lasts a day or two at a time.

Or maybe a lifetime, as it did for two of the most influential minds of the 20th century. The Swiss-French dreamer and part-time architect Le Corbusier and the German philosopher Martin Heidegger both had a lifelong penchant for huts. Let’s call them the aristocracy of the hut, for two reasons.

The first has to do with design. Le Corbusier may have created vast apartment blocks and even an entire city in India, but there is something immensely seductive about his smaller projects. The smallest of the lot was his cabanon (cabin), a beach hut built on an area of less than four square metres. Le Corbusier used a complex geometry to create a space which was basic, functional, and yet beautiful in its simplicity.

Heidegger had his hut built at Todtnauberg in the Black Forest. It measured six metres by seven, about the size of the average Armier boathouse. It had a kitchen, a study/bedroom, and a washroom/spare bedroom. Old photographs show that Heidegger and his wife Elfride inhabited a space that was sparse and verged on the spartan. And yet looking at them I would give anything to spend time in that hut.

There’s a second reason why one might call Le Corbusier and Heidegger the hutted aristocracy. In both cases the hut was inseparable from the life work. It wasn’t a matter of a place where to spend one’s holidays (a word I abhor in any case). Heidegger’s philosophy was in many ways a product of the hut at Todtnauberg.

There is a certain charm to living the primitive way

Le Corbusier was so attached that he built a kind of replica hut in his studio in Paris and spent much of his later life working in it as a recluse, a sort of St Jerome figure. Obligingly, death came by way of drowning off the beach where he had his cabanon.

I doubt Le Corbusier would consider Armier, and White Rocks, and St Thomas Bay, to be the state-of-the-art. As for Heidegger, I suspect he would prefer a funny hat and red nose to a five-course dinner with Tarcisio Barbara of Armier Developments Ltd. But let’s not get judgmental and elitist.

I put the hut fetish down to two things. The first is obviously location. In the case of Malta, the attractions are the sea in summer and the countryside in winter. (Historically, of course, summer countryside villeġjatura meant just that.) For many, it seems, the thought of spending a few days by the sea offsets the company of rats, cockroaches, mosquitoes and day-old slops.

The second is more elemental and possibly explains the boathouses as well as the tents in the living room. There is a certain charm to living the primitive way. That can mean many things, but in this sense it’s about taking simple meals on rickety chairs, sleeping on hard mattresses, and running around in swimwear all day long.

The stalwarts will also tell you that those days or weeks are the best time to enjoy one’s family or the company of friends. Funnily enough, the ideal domesticity seems to reside in places that are far removed from the purpose-designed kitchens and living rooms which promise a lot but deliver a little.

There are days when I would happily take a bulldozer to the lot. The bright side is that it is quite possible, with the help of a drink or two, to go down to St Thomas Bay and see Le Corbusier sketching, or Heidegger philosophising.

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