The only place I always came back to

A cottage, a suitcase, and everything in between — People & Spaces founder Emilie Heinonen on growing up in motion, a wooden cottage in Finland, and the design philosophy that grew from both.

From a very young age I knew I would work with architecture. My mother collected American country house magazines and I would spend hours tracing over the floor plans, reinventing the layouts, working out how the spaces could be better. I was born in Helsinki but grew up moving every four years, always with a suitcase, always somewhere new. Different cultures, extraordinary people. It was a rich way to grow up and I wouldn't change it — but home, as a fixed and permanent thing, was never quite mine.

Except for one place.

A wooden cottage in Finland, built by my grandparents, surrounded by forest and overlooking a lake. I didn't live there. I visited. But it was the only place that never changed, the only place that felt like it had always been waiting for me. My grandparents were architecturally aware — the cottage had large glazing that brought the forest right inside. The pine trees stood just next to the glass, so tall and close that the boundary between inside and outside almost disappeared.

I think about that cottage more than any space I have ever designed.

What the cottage taught me

After studying Interior Architecture I spent two decades working across London, Sydney and Helsinki, on everything from private homes to large public and commercial projects. Some spaces worked and some didn't, and slowly I began to understand what made the difference. It was never just the design. It was always the people.

How they moved through a space. How they felt in it. Whether it asked something of them or gave something back. The best spaces I have ever worked on all had one thing in common — they felt inevitable. As though they could not have been any other way. That is what the cottage taught me. My grandparents didn't design it to be beautiful. They built it to belong, to the forest, to the lake, to the life they lived within it. The beauty followed naturally.

People & Spaces

I live in Bristol now, where I founded People & Spaces. The name is deliberate — it has always been about both, the people and the spaces they inhabit, and the relationship between the two. That relationship is what drives every project I take on.

When people ask about my design philosophy the word that comes up most is sustainability. But I want to be clear about what that means to me, because it goes further than materials and supply chains. To me, sustainable design means creating spaces that feel true. True to the person living in them, true to the building they are within, true to the way life is actually lived. A space that feels true doesn't date. It doesn't need to be redone in five years because a trend has moved on. It just quietly works, year after year, because it was designed around something real.

If a space feels permanent, comfortable, understated and full of meaning, you only need to design it once. Everything else is just rearranging.

This is what People & Spaces is built around and what I want to write about here. The thinking behind the work. The projects we are in the middle of. From a wooden cottage in Finland to the Georgian architecture we are surrounded by in Bristol, from the Southwest Coast Path to a camper van on the road across Europe.

I hope you will join us.

Emilie Heinonen
Founder, People & Spaces
peopleandspaces.co.uk

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