There is a new answer to the question of where someone lives. It no longer sounds like an address, it sounds like a flight schedule. London and New York. Geneva, Milan and Dubai. Winter in Verbier, summer in the Hamptons, autumn wherever the children’s school calendar happens to make the most sense.
For a growing class of globally mobile wealthy families, home is no longer necessarily a single place. It is a network of places, connected by private aviation, household staff, international schools and an infrastructure designed to make constant movement feel effortless. Some have begun to describe these people as Betweeners. Not expatriates in the traditional sense, not nomads. And certainly not travellers in the conventional meaning of the word. They are people whose lives are permanently distributed across several locations. Their homes move with them, so do their staff, routines, possessions and expectations. And underneath the apparent freedom sits a question rarely asked directly: Is this freedom, or simply a more elegant form of restlessness?
From Two Homes to Six
The wealthy have always owned second homes. A country house, an apartment in the city, a villa for summer. What has changed is the scale and frequency. Two residences can become three, then four, sometimes six. The distinction between primary and secondary home becomes increasingly meaningless because none is necessarily used as the permanent centre of family life. Instead, each serves a function. One may be close to the family’s business interests, another offers winter access to the Alps, a third provides proximity to school or relatives and a fourth is where the family spends the warmer months. The calendar, rather than geography, becomes the organising principle. There are practical reasons behind this evolution. Tax regimes increasingly compete for wealthy residents, international businesses make physical location less restrictive, private aviation compresses distances that once made multi-country living impractical. But financial optimisation is only part of the explanation. As one adviser working with internationally mobile families has put it, tax may open the door, but lifestyle determines whether people stay. The modern wealthy individual is increasingly selecting jurisdictions not only for what they cost, but for what they allow life to look like.
The Infrastructure Behind the Ease
From the outside, the arrangement can appear almost effortless. A family simply arrives in a new country and continues living exactly as before. In reality, the opposite is true. The apparent ease depends on an extensive operational infrastructure. There may be a house manager for each property, or one senior person coordinating several residences. A chef follows the family between locations, a personal trainer appears when required, a governess or private tutor maintains continuity for the children. Clothing is duplicated across houses, cars are already waiting, pantries are stocked, preferred toiletries are in place. The same mattress specification may exist in several bedrooms on different continents. The point is not extravagance, it is continuity. The most sophisticated version of this lifestyle attempts to eliminate the feeling of having travelled at all. A family may fly from London to the Alps and discover that almost nothing about daily life has changed. The house is ready, the staff are familiar, the wardrobe is already there. The only thing that has moved is the family.
When Logistics Becomes a Lifestyle
This is where the romance becomes more complicated. Managing several homes across different countries is, in operational terms, closer to running a small organisation than maintaining a traditional household. There are properties to maintain, staff to coordinate, schools to manage, flights to arrange, vehicles to move, tax obligations to monitor and endless small decisions that cannot simply be outsourced. The better the system works, the less visible it becomes. That invisibility can be mistaken for simplicity. It is not simplicity, it is infrastructure. The ultimate privilege may therefore not be having five homes. It may be having enough people and systems behind those homes that moving between them feels almost frictionless.
The Status of Having Somewhere Else to Go
There is another dimension to this lifestyle that deserves to be acknowledged. Multiple homes are practical assets. They are also social signals. Possessing a residence in London, a chalet in the Alps and a villa on the Mediterranean communicates something very different from renting an apartment when you visit. That status dimension is rarely discussed in polite conversation, but it is real. Luxury has always communicated position through objects and places. A watch, a car, a house, a yacht. Multiple residences extend that language into geography itself. The message is no longer simply I can afford this place. It becomes: I belong in several places. That is a particularly powerful form of status in an increasingly mobile world.
The Children Have a Different Geography
The most complicated part of this arrangement may not be experienced by the adults. It is experienced by their children. For parents, movement can represent opportunity. For a child, it can mean repeatedly rebuilding the basic architecture of everyday life. School, friends, sports, summer camps, teachers, the familiar route home. The problem is not necessarily the number of countries.+ It is the absence of continuity.
Experienced household staff can provide extraordinary organisational support, but they cannot entirely replace parental presence or the stability that children derive from knowing where they belong. This is why school often becomes the unexpected anchor. Even when parents move constantly, children need somewhere that does not. The family may have five houses, but the child may still need one place that feels like home.
Freedom One Breakdown Away
There is a quiet irony at the centre of this lifestyle. The more complicated the system becomes, the more dependent it is on everything working correctly. One cancelled flight can disrupt a week, one household staffing problem can affect an entire itinerary. The lifestyle can look like freedom precisely because enormous amounts of effort are being invested in preventing friction from becoming visible. And that creates an interesting paradox. The people with the greatest freedom to move may also be among those with the greatest logistical obligation to keep moving.
What Happens When Everywhere Becomes Home?
There is a philosophical question beneath the practical one. What does home mean when it exists in five different countries? For previous generations, wealth could mean the ability to establish roots in one exceptional place. For today’s globally mobile elite, wealth increasingly means the ability to avoid being constrained by any single place. That is a profound difference. But mobility has a cost that cannot always be measured financially. Belonging becomes more complicated, relationships become more distributed, children inherit several cultures without necessarily belonging completely to one. And the individual becomes accustomed to an unusual state of impermanence. Perhaps that is why the most interesting luxury associated with this lifestyle is not the private jet, the second home or the personal staff. It is the ability to decide where, at any given moment, life should happen.
The Luxury of Staying
There is an unexpected conclusion to all of this. As global wealth becomes increasingly mobile, staying still may itself become a luxury. A month in one place. The same table every morning, neighbours whose names are known, a school that does not change, a house that is not simply one stop in an annual rotation. For some, five homes will represent freedom. For others, the greatest luxury may eventually be choosing one. The future of wealth may therefore not be defined by how many places someone can call home, it may be defined by whether they still have one place they genuinely want to stay.
Photo: unsplash.com/Alpen Air
