This year, I’m following my dreams again

What do you do with January?
Do you start planning right away, or do you linger for a moment in that empty space?

For me, January always feels like an empty room. No furniture yet. No noise. No fixed plan. And honestly, for a long time that made me uncomfortable. Because emptiness sounds romantic, but it also raises questions. What will take shape here? And am I doing it right?

Yet this January feels different. Calmer. Clearer. Where this month used to be synonymous with stress for me, I now experience space. Something has shifted over the past months. As if the wind that once blew past me has finally settled at my back. Not because everything suddenly makes sense, but because I trust myself again. And because I am doing something I haven’t truly done in a while: dreaming. Thinking bigger. Allowing myself to move forward.

I have always taken the turn of the year seriously. Not as a list of resolutions, but as a moment of alignment. What am I ready to leave behind? What do I want to nourish? It has become a small ritual, one that brings calm, not urgency. Direction, not pressure.

This year, I consciously let go of patterns that no longer serve me. People-pleasing, for one, so often disguised as softness. I leave it behind not because it was wrong, but because it no longer fits the direction I am moving in.

My personal theme for 2026 is boundaries. Not as rigid lines, but as form. Like in a well-designed space: you intuitively sense where you are welcome, where you can linger, and where something ends. I am learning the difference between being available and losing myself. And I am practising receiving. Allowing what I create to give something back. Understanding that value doesn’t only live in giving, but also in keeping.

From that place, I continue building The Home of Soul. A concept born not from ambition, but from lived experience: from knowing how essential it is to have a place that holds you. A home that slows you down, brings stillness and invites you to come home, within yourself and within your life. What I share there is not a truth, but an invitation: to become the author of your own space, your choices, your rhythm.

I also want to step outside my comfort zone this year. I am looking forward to the recordings of the television programme Design Secrets, exciting and joyful at the same time. And I want to show myself more. Literally. On camera. For years I postponed that moment, waiting for it to feel safer. More finished. More certain. But perhaps growth lies precisely in starting before everything feels perfect. In allowing yourself to be seen.

The empty room will fill itself.
The real question is this: will you keep standing in the doorway, or will you choose, this year, to follow what you have known deep down for a long time?

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