Collecting Homes

Collecting Homes and the Art of Temporary Living: Narrating Interiors with Georges Perec is my upcoming book with Routledge.

Collecting Homes is at once an illustrated catalogue of the domestic interiors of a generation living on the run and an exploration of the entangled lives of humans and things, homely atmospheres, and the art of temporary living. Bringing together architectural theory, literary studies, and anthropology, the book explores how young people create and inhabit their temporary homes, and how these homes, in turn, shape their sense of being in the world.

Between an autobiographical prologue and a reflective epilogue, the book is structured around four theoretical chapters. These examine the curiosity of peering inside domestic interiors; the cultivation of homely atmospheres through things and spatial practices; the poetics of lists, materiality, and interior narratives in the works of Georges Perec; and the ways everyday things such as beds, screens, postcards, fairy lights, and secondhand furniture shape contemporary dwelling. The chapters are punctuated by four atmospheric intermezzos, each presenting five lived interiors through line drawings and narrative vignettes.