“Moving House” (and Offices, Apartments, etc.)

I see that only once in the history of Not One-Off Britishisms have I addressed the expression “to move house,” which is the British equivalent of what Americans mean when they say, “to move.” It was back in 2011, the first year of the blog, and I recounted, in passing, “the thrill of seeing,” in a New Yorker Janet Malcolm piece about Gertrude Stein, published eight years earlier, a sentence that began, ‘She and [Alice B.] Toklas were about to move house from Bilignin to a manor in Culoz, a few miles away…'” I didn’t mention that the first time I ever encountered the expression also had a New Yorker connection. It was in 1996 or so, and I was interviewing Tina Brown, the magazine’s editor in chief (who is British, as Janet Malcolm is not), and she said something about “moving house.” I had not yet devised the concept of NOOBs, but the expression was so striking and different that I filed it away in the recesses of my consciousness. The OED‘s first two citations for the phrase were…