There is a particular kind of grief that does not belong to the grief of losing someone or something. It is the feeling of becoming a new version of oneself — one that does not carry within it any pronounced negative emotion, and yet bears nostalgia in the experience. For years — more years than I should care to count, in full honesty — I had carried within me a certain version of myself in the future tense. That future I was, paradoxically, my most faithful companion. She was always there, just ahead of me, waiting patiently while I opened and closed my projects, began and abandoned the same academy twice. She never left. But with my piece on the unfinished floor plan, last week, something began to shift. The future tense is becoming the present. This long, elaborate story of identity — the story I began with the words „once I have finished” — is approaching its final chapter. And I feel a nostalgia.
The ‘stylist-to-be’ had been a fixture of my identity for so long that I had forgotten she was a fiction. A beautiful, necessary fiction on the outside, and a reality within. In the safe, comfortable zone of anonymous comfort. I arranged spaces, chose materials, instinctively understood what a room needed, and then stepped back, as though the work had done itself. As though I were merely an observer of my own expertise. In the background. In the silence of not claiming it.
What has shifted in this past week, I am still examining with a certain care.
I am working on my final project. A single-storey house, modest in scale, considered in detail. The floor plan is simple. Legible at first glance, without unnecessary complications. When I began to draw, I knew that if I were to falter anywhere, the whole would collapse. Japandi is not a style that forgives. Either you carry it through with consistency, or it becomes nothing more than a fashionable quotation.
For me personally, this is more than a design decision. For this, too, became part of the journey into the present, upon which I have set out. My natural inclinations would have led me elsewhere — towards a country house with the warmth of ranch style, towards layers of textiles. As does my own home, which also settles somewhere between brown and white. The light in the living area enters from the side, drawing slow shadows across the walls. The kitchen has its own axis, the working triangle resolved without ornament. The bedroom is stripped of all that is unnecessary, and in that restraint there is more character than in many an over-decorated room I hold dear. The presentation in its entirety — thirty pages, visualisations, texts, every surface clean and precise. I spent two days choosing a typeface, that it might sit perfectly. This house is not my style. And yet — or perhaps for that very reason — it is the most honest project I have ever designed.
To finish means, in some measure, to take one’s leave. To lose the luxury of the future tense — that soft and forgiving place, where everything is still possible and nothing is yet definitive. The moment you step into the present, the moment you say „I am” in place of „I shall be” — you become accountable to the dream. And that is both a gift and a weight.
And beneath it — the true floor plan. The one I have been revising through all these years. The one with several storeys, several rooms, which has survived every renovation to which I have subjected it.
This one I intend to keep. Only in another form — beneath the surface. The final project has three weeks remaining until submission.
With love,
Nicolette xx
