Can a Home Give More Than It Takes?
An introduction to Marmalade Fox, and a rather ambitious idea for a family home.
I’m Victoria, an interior designer and project manager, and I have an inconvenient lifelong ambition: to create a home that is beautiful, unmistakably ours and kinder to the world it occupies. My husband and I both work in home building, which ought to make this straightforward. In practice, it means we know how many decisions sit behind a finished room, how easily a budget can lose its sense of proportion, and how often the most interesting questions are left until the tiles have already been ordered.
We also have two young boys. Whatever we create will need to accommodate real family life: muddy shoes, half-finished projects, noise, deafening solitude and the apparently limitless storage requirements of very small people. I want colour, texture, art and handmade things. I want somewhere calm enough to think, whimsical enough to keep discovering, and forgiving enough that a scratch doesn’t become a household catastrophe. The challenge is to bring all of that together with a serious consideration of what our home asks of the planet.
What would giving back actually mean?
The question behind this journal is whether a home can give more than it takes. It is an appealing idea, but also a phrase that deserves some interrogation before it comes to fruition. More of what, exactly? Energy? Habitat? Wellbeing? And what has been counted on the other side? A low energy bill can’t tell me what was demolished to achieve it, where the materials came from, or how soon they might need replacing. I want to look at those questions together, even when the answers make the design less convenient.
For me, sustainability needs to begin before the finishes. It belongs in the decision about whether to build or renovate, how much space we really need, what can be kept, and which parts of a home can change as family life changes. It belongs in the unglamorous conversations about insulation, ventilation, maintenance and repair. There is little point treating a reclaimed door as an environmental victory if we’ve avoided asking whether we needed another room in the first place.
That doesn’t mean I have a fully resolved specification for a net-positive house waiting in a drawer. I have an ambition, a growing reading pile and a willingness to examine the compromises. I want any claim that our home “gives back” to be specific enough to test, with its limitations visible. Producing energy, supporting wildlife, building resilience to climate change, and making a place that feels good to inhabit are worthwhile aims, but they are different aims. A garden brimming with wild flowers won’t conveniently cancel out every other decision.
The life inside it
Alongside the practical questions, I keep returning to what it means to feel at home. In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard considers the intimate places in which memory and imagination take root. His writing offers a useful way of thinking about a family house: the spaces that stay with us may be a sheltered corner, a stair or somewhere to retreat, rather than the room designed to make the grandest impression. I find myself wondering what our boys might remember of the home we make, and whether the plan leaves enough room for their own small worlds.
Juhani Pallasmaa’s The Eyes of the Skin asks us to consider architecture through more than sight. That feels particularly relevant in a profession so often encountered through photographs. I want to think about how a room sounds when everyone is home, how a hand meets a door handle, how light moves across a wall and what a floor feels like beneath bare feet. These are design decisions too. They deserve attention even when they contribute very little to the photograph.
My own question is how this care for everyday experience might sit alongside environmental responsibility. Could a home become easier to keep because it remains useful, comfortable and deeply loved? Could a material’s capacity to age well matter as much as its appeal on a sample board? I am interested in the relationship between the things we cherish and the things we choose to maintain. I would like to make rooms that can grow older with us, without needing a complete reinvention every time life moves on.
Enough house, properly considered
“The perfect house” is a tempting brief for a designer, although it becomes considerably more useful once perfection is allowed to include a budget, a laundry basket and other people. What I want is a home that fits our family and its setting, with enough flexibility for a future we cannot entirely predict. Some choices will be practical, some will be emotional, and some will involve me becoming unreasonably attached to a particular piece of stone. The useful work will be in recognising the difference and deciding what each choice is worth.
Marmalade Fox is where I will work through that process: the research, the materials, the people making interesting things, and the decisions that survive contact with real life. Sustainability will run through the conversation, alongside craft, character, physical and mental health, and the pleasure of living somewhere that reflects the people who live there. I want to understand what a better home could be, and what it would actually take to make one. There will be books, drawings and awkward questions. There will almost certainly be tea.
On my reading table
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space.
Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses.
