Inspiration Exchange

HomeExchange brought together two Spanish authors with completely different literary styles, Estefanía Ruiz and Defreds, and set them a challenge: to swap houses over the summer. Each writer began a short story inspired by the home, its surroundings and the details of the exchange they were living through.

Halfway through the process, the two authors swapped houses again, and with them, their unfinished manuscripts. Each one had to pick up the story the other had started and bring it to an ending neither of them had originally planned, letting the change of house and perspective shape how the story closed. It meant trusting a stranger with the continuation and resolution of something deeply personal.

The result: two original short stories, each written in two voices by two different authors, arriving at unexpected endings. Readers are invited to guess where one writer's contribution ends and the other's begins.

The idea deliberately mirrors the product itself. Home exchange is built on opening your door to someone else and being welcomed into another member's home in return, an act of trust and cultural exchange, with no money changing hands. The campaign translates that same act of trust from a physical, lived experience into a literary and creative process.

Both authors spoke about how the format affected their writing: Defreds described how writing inside someone else's home, surrounded by their objects, light and routines, forced him to listen to the space in a new way, so that the finished story no longer belonged to him alone but also to the house where it was born. Estefanía Ruiz described the exercise as writing four-handed without ever sharing a room, trusting that the other author would take care of what she handed over, continuing a story she hadn't started, in a house she didn't know, and finding the other's voice inside it.

🔗 https://es.homeexchange.com/es/blog/intercambio-de-historias/