The entrance: where your home meets you first

There is a moment most people skip. The moment between outside and inside. Between the world and you.

The entrance.

My first kisses, as a teenager, were always at the front door of my parents’ house. Or just inside, in the hallway. A boyfriend who had cycled me home, and before he left again, that moment of standing still. Sometimes kissing in the rain on the pavement, sometimes in the half-light of the hall. Not quite inside, not quite outside. An in-between space. Small. Quiet. But full.

An entrance carries something the other rooms cannot carry. A goodbye. A meeting. A breath between one life and another.

In the Netherlands that moment is often so short you barely feel it. A narrow hallway, a row of coats, shoes that no longer fit on the rack. You squeeze past an overloaded coat stand and before you know it you are standing in the middle of your life. Without transition. Without arrival.

In my work I notice that the entrance is one of the first things to go the moment a design runs over budget. Leave the entrance, I hear. It’s about the living room. And still I cannot go along with it. The entrance is not an extra. It is your home’s first embrace. Or the absence of one.

Because think about what it says when you give your entrance no attention. Visitors come perhaps a few times a month. You come there every day. If the entrance is structurally skipped, you are saying — often without realising it — my homecoming does not count. I only begin to exist in the living room.

It is also the sign of someone living in transit. On the way, not arrived. Someone who celebrates the moment of transition nowhere: not between work and home, not between outside and inside, not between one life and another. The entrance then becomes the mirror of a larger pattern: everything in service of what is coming, nothing in service of what is.

In House as a Mirror of Self, Clare Cooper Marcus writes that the entrance is precisely the place where we set down our persona, as Jung called it. The image we show the world. But perhaps the real question is not what your entrance tells others. It is what it tells you. Every single day.

A good entrance is calm. The light is warm. The coats are out of sight. One thing that is right, instead of ten things that happened to end up there. No performance. Just presence.

A threshold that says: you are allowed to be here, before you have to do anything.

A home that receives you before it asks anything of you.

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