BREAKING #332

In love with a room

Column

August 2026

is a writer, art historian, and founder of See All This art magazine. Since 2020, she writes a weekly column for the BREAKING-the-week art newsletter.

Column

August 2026

I walk through the house whose every mood I know. It is a diary of light and dark, of familiar and unsettling sounds, and of every scent. A trace of honeysuckle through the open window, the damp of the cellar and the polish on the floors and tables – all the way to the pantry, where jars of strawberry jam and tomato chutney line the shelves.

From the garage through the hall, past the kitchen, to the open door leading into the garden, where my father is sitting on the bench beneath the window. He laughs his laugh as he points out the birds. The chiffchaff. The robin. The thrush. Something falls away from me as I slide onto the bench beside him and he pours rooibos from the turquoise teapot into yellow cups with chipped handles.

It all takes place in my imagination. The house was sold years ago, but in my mind I turn the key in the lock. I know every detail. Every character and mood of the objects that slowly filled the house: the monastery table, the Castiglioni lamp, the Braun egg timer and the Rubenesque wooden angel, an acquisition we daughters fiercely objected to.

The French philosopher and physicist Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962) studied the spaces of our intimate lives, making a topographical analysis of the house. He described this exploration of the imagination in his 1957 classic The Poetics of Space, a book that reads like a poem, with chapters such as House and Universe, Drawers and Wardrobes, Nests, Shells and Corners.

Our imagination turns houses into inner landscapes. For our memories, Bachelard writes, are stored spatially. In the corner of the kitchen, in the drawer of the sideboard, beneath the table where we once built a house within the house. Bachelard reveals the happiness of an absolute reciprocity: we inhabit our rooms, but those same rooms inhabit us.

Perhaps the most beautiful rooms we all know live on film. Think of the rooms filled with longing in In the Mood for Love, the simple room of Hirayama in Perfect Days, or the summer rooms of Call Me by Your Name. The winter issue will be devoted to Laboratories of Living. The Rooms We Fell in Love With – and all those rooms that never left us.

Nicole Ex,
editor-in-chief

PS Which room did you fall in love with? Let us know via info@seeallthis.nl, with the subject line My Favourite Room.

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