The magic I could not name
When I walk into a house, within a few minutes I feel what is not right.
It is not analysis. It is the energy. I take in the whole at once: the layout, the flow, the light, the material, the colour.
Designing is not something I do. It is who I am. For almost twenty years every space has gone through that scan by itself. And it reaches further than furniture: it is about the architecture itself. Taking down walls, rearranging, making the flow of a house work.
When a project was finished, people would say: how beautiful it is here. And something always followed. I feel so at home here. I can finally land. They did not quite know why themselves. Neither did I. What I was doing felt so obvious that I could not put my finger on the magic.
So I wanted to understand it.
My background in psychology set me on my way; I trained as a registered coach. Alongside that I went into what you might call spirituality: attention for what happens beneath the surface. Everything I had been doing intuitively I brought back to a method, and wrote it out as a programme: The Home of Soul. Eight weeks, step by step, with a theme each week — vision, architecture, colour, material, light, flow, expression and integration. You work on your house and on yourself at the same time. Not by replacing everything, or perhaps precisely by that, but above all by choosing more consciously what feels right for you.
When it was finished I thought: this feels so true, but am I right? Does something like this really not exist yet? I went looking. That is how I came across Jung, and across Clare Cooper Marcus, who spent twenty years researching it and wrote a book about it: House as a Mirror of Self. They confirmed what I felt. But where they stopped, at that mirror, I carried on. Into practice. Because I want it for everyone: coming home a little more to yourself, and a good, physical home as well. That feels like my mission.
Because a house does not only reflect who you are. It also shapes you. As you truly make a space your own, something shifts in you. You start coming home differently. It has not changed the way I design. I have only given words to something that was always there, so that someone else can learn it.
In our field a great deal revolves around how something looks. Around proportion, colour, the perfect photograph. And that matters. Whether you design, build or supply: everything we make ends up in someone’s real home. But the finest compliments I have ever received were never about how something looked. They were about how someone finally felt at home.
So perhaps the question is not even a professional one. It is: where do you come home? And does your own house do for you what you so want to do for others?
Mariska Jagt — interior designer and founder of The Home of Soul