There is a moment — sometimes quiet, sometimes sudden — when you realize the life you are living and the space you are living it in no longer match.
You feel it in the body before you can name it. A resistance when you walk through a door. A heaviness in a room that used to feel easy. The sense that something has been left behind — but the walls have not caught up yet.
That feeling is not confusion. It is clarity. Your body knows that a new chapter has begun. The space just hasn't been told yet.
When I enter a home in a moment of transformation, I do not begin with objects. I begin with the structure — the bones of the house. Structure defines proportions, and proportions define possibilities. Some spaces allow change almost naturally. Others resist it. Understanding this difference early shifts everything.
From there, I look at how the space moves: how light enters and travels, how air circulates, how one room relates to another. I look for dead ends — places where movement stops without purpose, rooms with strange proportions, areas where light does not reach. These are the invisible tensions a space carries. The body feels them as discomfort, without always being able to name them.
Only at the end do I look at objects. Because objects do not resolve space — they follow it.
When a baby arrives, the house expands in a way that is almost impossible to anticipate. What was once ordered becomes dispersed. The baby is everywhere — in the living room, in the bedroom, in the kitchen. It is, in a way, the biggest roommate you have ever had.
I know this not only through clients, but through my own experience. A baby changes everything — and the challenge is not to control this expansion, but to integrate it. To create a space that can hold this new presence without losing a sense of calm.
Storage becomes essential, but not only as function. It must be flexible, adaptable, and at the same time capable of maintaining beauty. A piece of storage that is also an object of pleasure — a bench that holds, a shelf that breathes, a surface that can evolve as the child grows.
Materials matter more than people realize. What can the baby touch? What goes into the mouth? What must absolutely not fall? What height allows them to reach for the wall and take their first steps? A space designed for a new life must think through time — what serves today, what adapts tomorrow.
When children leave, something different happens. The house becomes quiet, but more importantly, it becomes exposed. Movement disappears, and with it, the logic that once made the space work. What was unnoticed becomes evident: the awkward corner, the room that never quite connected, the light that was always wrong. The absence of life reveals the structure of the house — and sometimes, its limitations.
This is a moment of great opportunity. The house can be returned to you — to who you are now, not who you were when you first arranged it. Sometimes that means a single room. Sometimes it means understanding the whole differently.
In a separation, the challenge is not spatial in an obvious way — it is emotional. The house holds memory. The same bed, the same orientation, the same atmosphere. The space keeps you in the past, not because it is poorly designed, but because it belongs to a version of life that has ended.
I worked with a client in Kensington who had recently gone through a divorce. Many people around her said she needed to leave — to abandon the bedroom, to start somewhere else. Instead, we transformed it. We changed the orientation of the bed, introduced a new rug, a different color, a shift in how light entered in the morning. The gestures were precise and relatively small. But the room shifted — and with it, her sense of ownership over her own life. It became hers. And that shift opened the possibility of a new beginning without the rupture of leaving.
I think often of the Schindler House in Los Angeles — designed in 1922 by Rudolf Schindler as an experiment in communal living. After he and his wife separated, they continued to share the house. Not despite the architecture, but because of it. The house had been conceived with distinct wings, separate patios, independent territories within a shared structure. Two lives, unfolding in parallel, held by a single design. Close, but free. Connected, but independent.
A home, if understood deeply enough, can hold more than one version of a life.
When work enters the home, a different tension appears. The immediate instinct is to place a desk wherever it fits — often in the bedroom. But the bedroom is not a neutral space. It is a place for rest, for intimacy, for disconnection. Introducing work there without intention alters its balance in ways the body registers long before the mind does.
The solution is not a desk. It is a space.
In Japanese architecture, the concept of *Ma* — 間 — describes the charged interval between things. It is not emptiness. It is a meaningful pause, full of tension and possibility. In martial arts, Ma is the distance between two bodies — not contact, not distance, but the alive space in between. In architecture, it appears as a step that separates two rooms without a wall. A change in floor material. A horizontal beam that crosses a space without dividing it. These are invisible lines — boundaries the mind registers without the eye seeing a partition.
This is what I bring to the work-from-home challenge: not a wall, but a condition. A shift in light, in orientation, in material — that tells the body where one activity ends and another begins. Where rest lives, and where focus lives. The space becomes continuous without becoming exhausting.
I also take into deep consideration what surrounds the home — the garden, the vegetation, the relationship with the outside. These connections become more important in moments of change. They ground the space, open it, give it continuity across seasons. Sometimes what needs to transform is not inside, but in how the outside is allowed to enter.
A home is never only interior. It is always in dialogue with light, with air, with what grows around it.
A home can hold a past. Sometimes too well. But it can also be redesigned to hold what comes next — not to erase what was, but to make room for what is becoming.
When life changes, the space must change with it. That shift — spatial and quiet — can give you back something essential: the sense that a new chapter is not only possible, but already beginning. The sense that the space is yours again.