How We Live – The Choreography of a Home

On Ritual, Memory and the Sacred Language of Things

When an architect asked me ‘How do you live?’ during discussions about renovating our new home in Devon, I knew immediately that he understood homes and spaces the same way I did. He wasn’t asking about practical matters – square footage, room layouts, or daily routines. Instead, he was probing something far deeper.

I’ve long believed that entering someone’s home is like stepping into their mind. Our living spaces are external expressions of our inner worlds, physical translations of the ideas and values that shape us. Each cherished object is a repository of memory and meaning, holding within it the stories and relationships that have shaped our lives. In asking how we live, he was really asking about the fundamental principles that guide our life – the core beliefs from which all other aspects of life flow. He was asking about the vision behind creating a home that transcends mere shelter to become a sacred space where the sacred and ordinary merge.

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Home is our sanctuary.

It is a place where the ordinary activities of everyday life are considered vernacular rituals of relationship and communion – with one another, with objects, with nature. When Pasolini said of his films, ‘I want to restore to reality its original sacred significance’, he could have been writing a manual for our home.

The day starts before sunrise.

I brew lapsang for myself in a teapot I made forty-five years ago. When Michael Cardew, with whom I apprenticed, was first shown the collection of his own work in the V&A Museum, he was appalled to find them without blemish. He would be proud of our teapot, with all the chips and cracks that bear witness to the choreography of daily use. For Kyra, I make coffee, one of the few habits that have survived her move from the East Coast. Whilst I spent my youth in my studio making pots, Kyra spent hers in the hallowed cloisters of Harvard and Stanford. I make and talk; she writes and dances.