A room of my own
Why I can find inspiration only in unproductive spaces
Hey internet friends,
I’m sorry I’ve been quiet. The last few weeks felt like a cosmic void, as if everything I’d learned, collected, and cared for had dissolved into a thick liquid of worries, impossible situations, and overthinking. Nothing to say. Or maybe too much, in no shape at all.
So I started looking closer at the place where I actually spend most of my day: home.
Every morning I wake up and scan the room, detail by detail.
Objects I’ve hoarded like talismans, carried from apartment to apartment.
The softened corners from too many moves and dust on surfaces. The wrinkled magazines I rescued from humid houses and angry cardboard. My mother’s lamp, proof that a parent will hand you their brightest thing to make your living room less bleak. The typewriter from an ex, a reminder that time is both fragile and tyrannical.
I’ve always craved a room of my own. As a designer/art director/artist, I’ve been devoted to space.
I kept trying to carve out a corner that felt serious enough for decisions, clear enough for attention, soft enough for inspiration. But the truth is: I’ve never fully felt at home. Anywhere.
I tried to fit in the stereotype, the designer’s cave: every piece of stationery justified, sketches on the wall, posters aligned, the inevitable Vitra toolbox. That liminal studio we carry from the first day of our career, frozen in time like the last defense against capitalism’s speed and the cult of productivity.
But for me, the space of productivity often becomes the most unproductive. I spend hours staring at a screen, surrounded by my small reliquary, and nothing comes out, not a single image, not a single frame.
I’ve always admired (or maybe just romanticized) the people who say: I’m locking myself in the studio for three days and not leaving without a masterpiece, the kind of piece I’d want my idol to find as an antique treasure in fifty years.
That kind of consistency: repeat the model, follow the schema, get the result.
Me? I’m weirdly attached to unproductive spaces.
The moments that should be empty… but instead fill up with stimuli, ideas, voices, visions.
The blank page makes me melancholic. Four hours at the desk hunting for the perfect shader breaks me a little.
But on my commute, when the narrow path by the park spills into a wide field and the faint Dutch sun catches a small pool of water, everything clarifies.
The shader I’ve been chasing suddenly shows itself. The words I never manage to say lift in my throat.
I never fully understood why these off spaces matter so much to me.
Why does the stability of a studio, a city, a box of memories fail to spark once the first fire dies? But I’m starting to see it.
I’ve seen some new subscribers, even if I’ve been quite inactive (and I would be forever grateful for this), so I’d like to recall some of my most beloved topics that might resonate with you, too.
In Never Enough, I wrote about being multidisciplinary and emotionally drained, trying to be many roles and feeling like none of them. This is the same story, told by a room: the space that should produce becomes the space that paralyzes. The “edge” isn’t more output; it’s learning where the work actually starts.
In Empty rooms and blank pages, I wrote about the freeze that happens in “productive” spaces and the relief of switching rooms, mentally, so the work can begin. That’s the core move here.
A love letter to uncertainty stands in the same doorway: when productive spaces freeze, uncertainty invites the first line, and that’s the only honest place to start a sensory, living identity.
So maybe a room of my own isn’t a physical room at all.
It’s a mental room, a space where attention releases its grip on the goal (solve the problem!) and swivels, gently, to look elsewhere. To catch a color hiding in a crease, a metaphor waiting at the edge, a possibility that can’t breathe inside rigid walls, structures, contracts, or roles.
Not a finish line for the idea,
a starting line.
See you soon (maybe)
L.