Notes on Home
What makes a house a home
Today I viewed a flat. Bigger than ours, better located. And still, on the way home, I found myself wondering whether I had not long since found what I had been looking for all along. On arriving, the longing for more and the art of making yourself a home.
I have moved house many times – as a child and teenager not always by choice, to be honest. The familiar was always dearer to me than the unknown and new, even when the new was often bigger or more beautiful. That is simply how we are: we find less to love in the unknown than in the familiar, until the unknown becomes familiar – and then, mostly, I had to move again, or wanted to.
Somewhere along the way a longing for the lasting grew, for the nest that waits for you, familiar and always the same, while you discover the world and develop and change.
When I was looking for pictures for this entry, I found photographs of my former live-in studio at Schloss Arenberg in Salzburg. A different place, a different life. And yet I recognise in them much of what surrounds me today.
Apparently there is a certain idea of home that moves with me: warm colours, things with a history, materials you like to touch.
Perhaps we carry that feeling with us, to some extent, and try to recreate it in every new place.
Today I viewed a flat again. Bigger than ours, perhaps even better located. On paper it would be an improvement in many respects.
And still I caught myself on the way home thinking how much work, time and love it would take to turn it into the home we already have.
Our children are still small, I have lived in Zurich for barely two years, and much still feels like arriving.
Perhaps I am in too much of a hurry. Our small, lovely home gives us so much warmth and shelter right now. It may not be particularly big, but it is ours. And I notice that in my search for more space I had almost forgotten that.
As an interior designer I know how much spaces shape our sense of being at home. For me, colour creates that feeling. Texture you can feel. Details the eye can rest on and enjoy. All of this we have created here – and earned.
I love the warm light in the evening, the familiar things that have travelled with us from flat to flat, and the calm a room can radiate even while two children are playing in it.
For me, beauty is not something that only happens in pictures. It changes how we feel in a place.
Of course, with two small children our flat rarely stays the way I would like it as a designer. No sooner have I tidied something away than it is back on the floor.
And yet I love the small rituals that have grown here: our places at the table, the view from the window, the light at certain times of day. By now we know the rooms so well that we hardly think about them.
Perhaps that is exactly the difference between a beautifully furnished flat and a home: it is not only designed but lived in. And it grows with the life that happens within it.
Of course one more room would be lovely. Space for the children, perhaps a study of my own, a little more air.
Then again, I would probably feel at home in a castle too. I even know that from experience. And would soon have ideas there about what could still be improved.
But where do you stop?
I do not want to lose the joy of designing. Perhaps I just need to tell apart more clearly when I wish for change – and when I really need it.
When I come home tonight, no perfect picture will be waiting for me. But a place where we have arrived.
For the moment, that may be more than enough.
