Coming home in a place that is not yours

For years I thought I had to be away in order to come home. To myself, I mean. Feet in the sand, the sea in front of me, far from everything that had to be done.

Perhaps you know the feeling. That you only notice how tense you were once you have been away for a while. As if coming home is something that only works if you leave first.

Last year I found that distance without travelling. I gave myself something I had not done in years: standing still. I let go of my studio, cleared my diary and went looking for who I was without projects, without the status of. Honestly: for a while I did not even know whether I still wanted to design.

In that silence The Home of Soul came into being. Not at a desk, but on walks, in writing, in feeling. I started to create again without a goal. And in that I discovered something simple and large at the same time: designing is what makes me happiest. Not the bigger. The truer.

I had promised myself not to take on a large commission that year. I said no. To everything. Until, in the autumn, I was asked for Villa de Duinen, a boutique hotel on the coast where I sometimes ate. The first feeling was right immediately.

On paper I should have refused. The deadline was fixed and too tight, it would be my first project without a studio behind me, and I had actually meant to end my sabbatical in South Africa. But there is something in me that starts to burn precisely when something cannot be done. I said yes.

And here is the remarkable part: what I made there was exactly what I had needed to relearn for myself. I designed the space from the light — from the fresh morning sun to the golden hour that slowly fills the lounge. I gave the acoustics as much attention as the colour, so that sound wraps around you instead of pushing you on.

The first time I sat there myself, with everything finished, I knew it again: this is where I belong.

A place where people arrive, eat, drink and leave again. A place that asks nothing of them. Where for a moment they are allowed to be guests of themselves.

What I found myself wondering was this: why do we so often grant that — being received, sinking down, breathing — only to places that are not ours? To the hotel, the holiday house far away. And then come home to a house we stopped really seeing long ago?

Because a place does not have to be yours to hold you. And a place that is yours certainly can, if you let it.

In Villa de Duinen a home came into being for strangers. And in the meantime I came home again as a designer.

Perhaps that is what I want to ask you. Not how beautiful your place is. But whether it receives you. Whether you allow yourself to truly land somewhere. Including in the house you already live in today.

Mariska Jagt — interior designer and founder of The Home of Soul