The Light of Winter Afternoons

In winter the light comes in low and stays on the wall for longer. Anyone who works with interiors knows it: you have to wait for it before deciding anything.

This article gathers a few observations on how a single room changes between four and six in the afternoon.

Materials have a memory. Wood darkens where the hand rests every day, metal turns more matt over the years, and glass keeps, in a way you can barely see, the way it has been cleaned. A project that takes this into account does not try to stop wear, but lets it in as one more collaborator. The result is never exactly what was drawn, and that difference, looked at properly, tends to be the most alive part of the work.

There is a way of working that consists in starting from the end: imagining the house or the shop already lived in, with its things out of place and its lights on at odd hours, and only then asking what it needed. Often the answer is far less than had been planned. The people who live or work there occupy the space all at once and with an energy no plan can anticipate; the best you can do is leave them room, and a certain margin for getting things wrong.

There is no recipe, only the habit of looking again at the same hour.

None of these ideas is new, and probably none is exclusive to any one trade. But they are easily lost when there is a hurry, a tight budget or expectations about how things should look. That is why it is worth writing them down from time to time: not as a rule, but as a reminder of what we wanted to do when everything was still possible. The notes that follow are just that, a reminder, and like all reminders they serve mostly the person who writes them.