Have I become an animist?
Interior designer Carole Vaudable
In summary:
a home can feel empty even when nothing has physically changed
spaces hold what happens inside them over time
you can feel when a home has been lived in or left behind
design is about changing how a space feels, not just how it looks
A home is not just four walls
Have you ever felt something in a place that didn’t come from the people in it, but from the place itself?
I had that experience in a very direct way.
One of my homes was a place that had once been full of life: people were there, things were happening, there was movement, noise, daily life. Then time passed, people left and the home stayed behind.
When I saw it in my dream, everything was still there: the furniture, the objects, the rooms, the structure. Nothing had been removed but the feeling had completely changed.
The home felt deserted and more than that, I felt the emotion of the home like it was a person who had emotions. She felt sad and abandoned.
Not as an idea. I could feel it in a very precise way, like you feel someone’s presence when you walk into a room. It felt like the home itself was carrying that emotion.
The closest way I can describe it is animism. As if the space itself had a kind of presence in a very real, physical way. The home felt like something that had been lived in, then left behind and it stayed with it.
That moment changed how I see spaces. Since then, I don’t think of a home as things. It’s not just walls, furniture and objects. It holds what happens inside it, it reflects it.
You can feel it immediately when you walk in: some homes feel alive, others feel empty, even when everything is there.
That experience made that impossible to ignore.
Written by Carole Vaudable, interior designer.
