Soon we will dissolve our household. When I look around our flat, the task almost overwhelms me. To take everything we own into our hands, to question it and to assign it a place, or none. I find it hard myself to see, in this process, the happiness I write about. And yet I sense that exactly here lies something important.
It is frightening and at the same time healing to know that an ideal home will not exist for us. Wherever we move, we will meet our inner space there. Our stories, our preconditions, what we fear. To create a home therefore means to make a connection. A connection between the inner space and the space we live in.
This insight changes how I work as an interior designer. It is often assumed that certain materials have certain effects. Wood counts as warm, familiar and pleasant. Such assumptions can be helpful. But if I presuppose them without questioning them, I pass over the inner space of the person the room will meet. When I design for a particular person, I therefore no longer begin with material or form. I begin with their inner space.
Working on this threshold, an overarching aim has emerged for me. I work towards an atmosphere of home that matches our identity and strengthens us at the core. I am not looking for a perfect house. I am looking for a coherent one, one in which inner and outer space correspond.
Where designed space and inner space correspond, the possibility of coherence arises. The possibility of an atmosphere that matches our self, joins with it and strengthens us at the core. For that, mindful room must be found in the inner space, also for what we want to part with on the outside. Some of it we may forget. A liberating forgetting, not a repressing.
When we arrive, at the other end of the world, it will not be about a perfect home. It will be about a home that is enough, one that brings inner and outer space together and opens the door for what is new. Because what remains of a space when the place is gone is the inner space. Perhaps, in the end, design is exactly that. A way of finding a home that matches us, wherever we go.