The More You Travel, the More You See

I am in the middle of preparing for a trade show in Marrakesh, and already, before I have even landed, I can feel it doing its usual work on me. Every trip does this. I arrive somewhere thinking I have a fairly settled sense of how a space should feel, and I leave a week later with that sense quietly rearranged.

It happens in small moments, usually. A courtyard that manages to feel cool in blistering heat without a single visible trick. The way a market stall arranges colour against colour in a way no design course would ever teach you, and yet it works instantly. A hotel lobby that tells you everything about a country's sense of hospitality within the first few steps through the door. None of this is something you can research your way into understanding. You have to stand in it.

I think this is why I have never really trusted the idea of a fixed personal style. The moment you believe you have found "your look," you stop noticing the things that might change it. Travel keeps that from happening. You cannot unsee a cleverer way of using light once another country has shown it to you. You cannot go back to your old assumptions about colour once you have stood in a room that used it more bravely, and more rightly, than you would have dared.

What I bring home from these trips is rarely a literal object, though sometimes it is that too. More often it is a shift in judgment. A slightly different instinct for when to hold back and when to be bold, borrowed from somewhere I only spent a few days. Each place I visit adds one more voice to the conversation I am having with myself every time I start a new room.

So while a trip like this one is, on paper, about meeting people and showing our work to a new audience, I know the real value of it will show up much later - quietly, in a decision on some future project, made a little differently because of something I noticed on a street I will probably never walk down again.