Emma's garden

Visit Emma

There are places I want to remember. Places I immerse myself in without wanting to resurface. Emma's garden is one of those places. It amazes me, calms me down, lets me block out everything else.

Emma has shaped this place over many years. Not in a grand sense. It is not a garden that seeks to impress, but rather one that has slowly grown out of her ideas — from things she has found, built, altered, and repeatedly moved into their right place. She is a carpenter and interior designer, and much of what you see here has been made by her own hands. The materials are simple: wood, stone, metal. The colours are restrained, the forms clear. Nothing seems accidental — and yet everything feels completely natural.

Perhaps that is exactly what moves me about it. Here, design does not mean continually adding something more. It means knowing when something is enough. A table does not have to be special. It only needs to be there, so that bread can rest on it. A bowl does not need to stand out if it has exactly the right shape for a few tomatoes. A piece of wood is allowed to show that it is wood. Stone does not need to look like anything other than stone.

And then something strange happens: precisely because nothing asks for attention, you become more attentive. To the light. To the hands. To a crumb on the table. To the colour of a tomato beside a piece of wood. To the surface of a bowl. To what is already there. I think this is something that also occupies me in my own work. How little does an object need before we begin to develop a relationship with it?

I want to make things that are quiet. Things you enjoy holding, using, and perhaps eventually no longer consciously noticing because they have become part of everyday life. And at the same time, they should carry something within them — the trace of the material, of the hand, of the moment in which they came into being. Perhaps that is the real connection between Emma’s garden and my work: the pleasure of creating a place or an object from just a few things, until it feels right.

The photographs are from a year ago. The garden has continued to grow since then.