The Heart of a Home—
{on the elements that make a house a home}
BY Annika Hein

I have written and thought a lot about the concept of home: home as sentiment, home as a heart, home as a body… and it seems no matter the notion of home, there develops an undercurrent of feeling. Ideas of safety and shelter and security are the most pragmatic choices here, tangible things that make us feel protected and cared for. But what plays to a deeper more poignant chord, and what I’m more interested in exploring, are the emotional markers, the things that feel like home even in the absence of it. The smell of lilacs in spring, that special book you carry around for months, just to have it close, that full heart feeling after standing around the kitchen table at 1am with loved ones—cheeks sore from smiling, eyes glinting in the moonlight.

For the better part of 2021 and 2022 we were living in “homes” that were not our own and while our literal house was packed away into brown cardboard boxes and placed into storage our lives continued orbiting around a myriad of different places: axis points for a few months here and a few months there. During this time, I took with me a collection of things: talismans, trinkets, ephemeras, and relics that I had kept and imbued memories onto.

They weren’t necessarily imperative to creating the feeling of home, but they did make it a little more sentimental by adding a certain layer of familiarity and “us-ness”. It was interesting, even to me, the order, or the command of how I assembled this seemingly small box of treasured things, which items held more weight, which were essentially key props in the grand set of our lives and which things I really didn’t need in my peripheral for an open-ended period of time.

What I learnt is that home to many of us really is a feeling, and while there are certain elements that are conducive to comfort or to supporting the ways in which we like to live or create most of us are looking past the physical constructs and returning within and to nature when it comes to the ideals of home.

Here I ask four members of our JANE community to share their thoughts of the heart of their home.

Pernille Sandberg
Photographer

Where is the heart of your home?
My honest answer would certainly be that my sense of home is to be found within myself.
Throughout my life, I haven’t been living in the same place for more than a stretch of three years at a time. I never planned it to be this way, it simply turned out like this. 

As a child of a wildlife photographer, I accompanied my parents on many journeys, and growing up, we moved base several times. I quickly learned that home, to me, is not a physical place, but the people I’m surrounded by, and my foundational emotional system that defines my perception of this world. 

Home is, in other words, the art of understanding oneself. True safety, true honesty, and true emotional transparency that brings your soul a deep sense of peace can only be found when one dares to look within and face oneself without fear without judgment. 

What elements make it that way: How does it smell/look/feel?
No matter where I’ve lived or worked, I’ve brought along my modest collection of art: photographs that resonate with me on important frequencies, photographs that inspire me and guide me aesthetically and spiritually every day. I surround myself with books, too, mostly on art, fashion, and architecture. Over time, my collection has scattered across a few countries, and my dream is to gather them all in one, tiny library completed with a beautiful daybed. 

I have a feeling that this dream is imminent. 

Kathryn Carter
Writer / Poet

Where is the heart of your home?
Home for me is not a house, it is the cosmos. Thus, its heart is not a concrete place but a pres-ence. Its heart is the emotion unexpectedly unearthed by a moon beam that has fallen through an open window. It is the calm of curling a page of a book from one side to the other. It is the breeze that waltzes with the red bell-shaped flowers in the garden, seducing the flame trees in a silent dance.

What elements make it that way: How does it smell/look/feel?
The presence of home smells like the dried flowers my grand-mère once kept in antique powder bowls. It sounds like bird songs that bathe the sky. It feels incorporeal—made of metamorphic matter pollinated by peregrinating stars.

Marta Bevacqua
Photographer

Where is the heart of your home?
I think the heart of my home is what I see from the window. For me, "home," is many things. I'm Italian, a grew up in a country house near Rome, which still remains in my heart and is a place I need to go back to at least twice a year.

Now, I live in Paris for the last 10 years and I live in the city, which is so different from what I was used to.

I usually tend to look outside to the trees (not so many here, unfortunately) and to the green and I usually tend to search for light and sky. [So for me] the heart of my home has been, and it will always be, the windows. I work from home (especially for post-production and pre-production) and my desk must be next to the window, or in front of it, or somewhere nearby. I have changed apartments many times in Paris and have always had this one need: light, window, a spot of green.

But home can even be where I don't live anymore, where I wish to live or where I live just for a few days per year.

Here's two pictures: what I could see from my room when I was teenager, from the country house I grew up in; and what I could see in a place I call "home” Svalbard, even though I have only lived there a few days per year. This photo is from when I went there in 2019.

What elements make it that way: How does it smell/look/feel?
Nature must be present, even if I can see only details. The more nature is present, the more I feel at my place. I like to open the window, even in winter, and feel the cold air. I keep it opened until I'm freezing. I like to keep it open when it's too hot, when it's raining as I can hear and smell the rain. I love looking at snow through it too, when I'm enough lucky to see the snow.

A window is what makes it "home" for me.

Frédéric Forest
Artist

Where is the heart of your home
The heart of my home is and always will be my birthplace; Annecy, in the French Alps. Today, however, I find myself making wherever I am located into my home. It can be Paris, but it can also be another location. Not necessarily a house or a physical space, a home is - at least to me, a sentiment or emotion. As life evolves, so do the emotions we have attached to spaces, cities, etc. When I work, I tend to choose spaces that bring me comfort and that feel like my home. As I get older and deal with family life, I realize this sentiment is more attached to time than location.  

What elements make it that way: How does it smell/look/feel? 
There are few places that truly make me feel like home. Mountains, lakes, and oceans all feel familiar and comforting to me. When I find myself in those natural surroundings, I instantly feel united with the quiet wilderness. Part of this is also that I can interact with these elements and, in a way, "play" with them by riding my snowboard down a slope, surfing on a wave, skiing, swimming, diving, cycling, running or walking. All of these actions allow me to integrate the space and feel one with my element. 

In other words, it's important that a home makes one feel like oneself; truly, fully. With that logic, a home can become a person, a fragrance, a specific light, an object, a piece of furniture, a season, a sound or a song. Home is about being connected both with yourself and those you cherish, whether they exist physically or in your imagination.