On Building a Home

Light Moves is a newsletter from PALTA Studio written by Sara Lerner. It is personal reflections and conversations with others on the continuous process of refining the shape of life. On food and design, creative identity, the importance of kitchens, career transitions, building a business, the spaces around us and what’s in between. 

Over the past few months, I’ve been shepherding myself through a slow migration to a new city. I spent the previous eight years in Stockholm, a pleasant Nordic capital with a diamond’s edge; orderly lines, minimalist angles, an austere, classic beauty that was home for a while until it wasn’t. 

The Sweden years have bookended themselves as a distinct era of home ownership in my life: the convenient dovetailing of my well-earning early thirties, my first experience with socialist structures that incentivized the collective effort of taking-care-of-one’s-things as a contribution to the overall wealth of a society, and the heyday of the non-existent mortgage rates of the 2010s. 

In eight years, I bought, renovated, and sold three apartments in quick succession. I’d had no conscious intention of flipping any of them, but having spent the first decade of my young adult life moving from city to city (Los Angeles, Milan, Los Angeles again, New York) and rental to rental, the thrill of owning the floor beneath me unlocked a creative impulse I didn’t know I had. 

During the pandemic, I added a long-neglected overgrown Swedish farmhouse to the list and embarked on my first true house renovation that would become an all consuming physical, emotional and creative outlet. Homeowning was, for me, a sort of exposure therapy – pitting boundless energy against stubborn principles, blind luck, and the will of the elements to try to create a more meaningful sense of purpose and place.

But what unfolded next was unexpected: mortgage rates tripled, I left my well paying job, my affection for Stockholm began to wane, and the nagging thought that I’d like to spend a portion of my creative and professional energy designing homes for others (kitchens, especially) had become too loud to ignore.

Without much warning, the inevitable itch for newness crept in. I found myself a year ago trying to intellectualize my way out of the problem state: Where should I build my next home? And what shape should this new life take?

By (western) historic standards, women my age are finding a level of financial independence many of our mothers could never have imagined. By the late 1970s, most unmarried women in the UK couldn’t even get their own mortgage without a man as their guarantor. A generation later, we’ve managed to carve out an often overwhelming and unexpected amount of airspace to explore the different forms a life, and its corresponding sense of home, can take-–its purpose and rhythm, textures and smells, sounds and use. 

So therein lied the champagne problem: I was a successful 35 year old woman with immense optionality. By this point, I worked for myself, held EU citizenship, and didn’t have to consider where I’d enroll kids in school. But the boundless, privileged freedom to define the shape of this new edgeless life was proving to be a paralyzing task.

I browsed mental brochures of cities my friends had nice lives in, places I didn’t mind so much, weighing pros like sufficiently “vibey” wine bars, a city that likes to swim, proximity to nature and thriving creative communities with more pressing cons - barely progressive politics, archaic levels of cultural diversity, debilitating healthcare systems. 

I spent some time doing “A Month In” trips. I spent spring in east London among friends, reminded of the thrill of culinary variety and big-city-strangers coupled with less thrilling damp flats, soaring real estate prices, and the knowledge I’d need a Brexit visa (and thus an employer) only to dabble in a life I wasn’t sure I wanted. 

I spent a November in Lisbon, renting a charmless flat in a dreamy neighborhood - a combo that always cancels itself out. It was a moment in time I thought the energy of a new city could compensate for soulless digs and my existential restlessness, but was of course wrong. 

But it did crystalize in my mind the things that make a scene feel like home before it has become truly your home. I recalled the countless places and oddly shaped life stages I’d managed to find home within. 

A string of dingy southern California bungalows with lacquered kitchens and musty wall-to-wall carpet. 

A wonderfully Art Deco, wood clad Milanese dream with drafty bathrooms and glass balconies that overlooked the corner where they strung up Mussolini’s body as a public display of post-fascist Italy. 

A loud, crumbling flat in New York’s Chelsea, crouched above a raucous gay bar with ceilings that leaked when it rained, a mouse we couldn’t kill, and a view of the Empire State Building from the bathtub. I waitressed nightshifts and spent my tips on overpriced produce at nearby Chelsea Market, cooking aggressively for my flatmate every night on a failing gas stove. 

And so, over the last few months, I’ve been making the slow migration to a life in Copenhagen. It’s a city that ticked a handful of boxes – creatively engaged, wine bars with vibe, likes to swim, an improvement on visible cultural diversity – but really it was just a place that felt right for right now and that was enough. I sold my last Stockholm apartment and 100% of the furniture in it and decided to start again on building a home.

After eight years of owning, I opted to return to the life of a renter – and for a while, to rent a furnished apartment to conserve some energy amidst all the transition. Perhaps the most important ingredient of making a home your home is having the energy to enjoy the process of doing so – and it is the unexpected, somewhat trivial parts of newness that are both the most fun and most draining. As one friend put it, summoning the energy it takes to decide where you’ll buy your lemons. 

I’ve found through this process, and in the many lives that have led up to it, that there is a collection of items that are the things I need to make a new home my home. Things I have packed up and dragged across the world, things I have replicated in country after country and flat after flat, things that without fail, within the first week in a new space, assemble themselves rather instinctively to bring me home. They are, for me, the things that count.

My list:

• A cast iron pot 

• A roasting pan

• One good knife

• A favorite wooden spoon

• A good blanket (wool)

• The right lighting

• The right pillows

• One good kitchen towel

• A bowl for your keys

Things that helped shape these thoughts:

• Deborah Levy’s Real Estate, a masterpiece

• Minnie Driver’s book of essays, Managing Expectations

• A recent episode of The Daily podcast on Renting vs Buying

• The only whole roast chicken recipe you’ll ever need 

• Nils Frahm’s The Dane while editing

• The loving reminder that “one can never have too many dutch ovens in one lifetime.”