Home truths

Sitting comfortably? Well, you certainly will be after reading our November issue, which includes not only a guide to the best in interior and residential design but also a wonderful Expo dedicated to the sofa. Nic Monisse, our design editor, who is always up for a challenge, set about persuading esteemed designers, gallerists and architects to let us into their homes to take portraits of them with their couches. While some of them live with masterpieces, one rising star is the proud owner of a sofa purchased from Ikea, which he had shipped all the way from London to Lagos.

What comes across in the reporting – and this is the reason why we gave Nic this mission – is how a well- considered sofa, a seemingly modest piece of design, can shape our lives. A sofa is a place where we can read, have TV dinners and curl up with a dog or a partner. It’s where ideas are hatched and where last-minute guests can be accommodated overnight. At monocle’s Midori House, it’s where we gather to plan the day’s radio shows, entertain visitors, interview potential staff and have meetings about upcoming issues. It was where we first wondered whether the very thing we were sitting on should become a story.

The idea of the home as a refuge, as a source of inspiration and a space where our lives can unfurl, is also picked up in a special series of essays, our “interior monologues”. Josh Fehnert, monocle’s editor, managed to wrangle a cast of screenwriters, diplomats and economists to talk about what home means to them. The film director Francis Ford Coppola, for example, tells us how he used to take the essence of his home, his children, away with him when he was abroad making movies, “sticking them in any school there was”.

In our office, one of these short texts really hit, well, home. Georgina Godwin has been part of the monocle family for many years and is perhaps best known for her wonderful voice and probing questions on Monocle Radio. She is originally from Zimbabwe but her family was forced to leave the country and she has been declared an enemy of the state so cannot return. This much – the facts – I knew. What I didn’t know was what it’s like to be from a place that still feels like home but can no longer be seen, touched or felt. “Home comes back down to people,” she says. “Of course, you can surround yourself with things. I might say I’m at home when I’m surrounded by my books, but you know, once you’ve lost material things, you realise that they don’t matter. I’ve managed to hold on to a couple of old family antiques and it’s lovely to have things but if I didn’t, it would be OK. Home, to me, is like being a tortoise – I take it with me.” It’s a sentiment that so many exiles and people who have sought refuge will identify with. Home is a special place.

Being surrounded by books is also a topic picked up by Simon Bouvier, our new bureau chief in Paris, who was tasked with surveying the city’s 400 bookshops and trying to explain how it has managed to hold on to so many glorious stores. He had a bit of a head start as his uncle, who makes an appearance on our pages, is an antiquarian bookseller.

It transpires that Paris has benefited from a series of literary-minded politicians who have enacted laws and developed schemes to protect this world. For example, Bertrand Delanoë, a former Paris mayor, bought up property in the city’s Latin Quarter with the specific objective of leasing it to bookshops at below the market rate. And, as Simon reports, through a gradual expansion of this policy, Paris is “now landlord to 25 per cent of all bookshops” across the city. It’s interventions such as this that have helped to keep the French capital vibrant, protecting its independent shops and allowing neighbourhoods to avoid death by chain store. If you want a good book to hunker down with on your sofa, we recommend a trip to Paris.

Finally, as always, thank you for reading monocle (whether on your couch or off) and please feel free to contact me at at@monocle.com with any thoughts, feedback or bookshop recommendations. — L