Thinking about Women Sitting in Rooms

Woman sitting alone reading a book, naturally.

We have been thinking about women sitting alone in rooms. Not lonely women. Not waiting women. Women who are simply in a room, doing the quiet, untranslatable thing that women do when nobody is watching — which is to say, everything.

It started, as many things do at Housefolk, with a painting.

We were looking for a hero image for our site. Something that felt true. We scrolled through the usual suspects — the bright kitchens, the staging, the books and plants arranged with suspicious precision — and none of it felt like us. None of it felt like the way people actually live, or the way they actually want to live, or the way they imagine themselves living when they are lying awake at 2am in a flat that isn't quite right yet.

And then we found a Hammershøi. A Copenhagen interior. A woman with her back to us, always. Never her face. The nape of a neck. A half-open door. Cool grey light that somehow feels warmer than anything we'd seen on any property website, ever. We looked at it for a long time. We sent it to each other with no caption, which is the highest compliment we know how to pay.

We have been looking at these paintings for years and we still don't know if she is peaceful or devastated and we think that might be the point.

Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring

Vermeer knew it too. His women stand at windows with letters they may or may not be about to open. They pour milk with the concentration of surgeons. The room holds them and they hold the room and there is no drama and somehow that is the most dramatic thing we have ever seen.

Vuillard pressed women into their own wallpaper. Absorbed them into the domestic until the woman and the room became the same sentence. We find this less sinister than it sounds. We find it true.

To be very clear — because someone will ask — we do not think women sit around in their bedrooms all day doing nothing. We are not romanticising idleness. We are not suggesting meekness. We are not depressed. We are not bored. We are, in fact, extremely busy. We are writing and painting and managing our ai agents and working and bringing up children and sending emails at midnight and doing the thing where you hold four conversations in your head simultaneously while also apparently making dinner. We know. We are all of us doing this.

But we are also prone to thinking. To the necessary pause. To sitting in a room and letting the room do something to us.

Which brings us to Hailey Bieber.

Novelist Taffy Brodesser-Akner's October 2023 profile for The New York Times Magazine describes visiting Hailey Bieber who was found sitting in a room doing nothing (and funnily enough we cannot find this article anywhere on the interwebs). This observation, depicting a moment of absolute stillness, became a viral talking point regarding her public persona. Just sitting. Not performing. Not doing anything the internet could name or monetise or turn into content. She was simply there, in a room, with her own thoughts, and the internet lost its mind. How dare she. What was she doing. Why wasn't she doing something. The mockery was instant and it was, we think, very revealing — not about Hailey Bieber, but about how deeply uncomfortable we remain with the image of a woman occupying space without justifying it. Without producing something. Without being, in some legible way, useful.

Hammershøi's women have been sitting quietly in rooms for a hundred years and we have called it art. Hailey Bieber does it once and we call it strange.

We are on her side. We are on the side of the pause.

What we are interested in is the room itself as a character. The particular quality of light at 3pm in a flat that is yours — really yours, even temporarily. The way a space holds the shape of you after you have left it. The coffee cup. The book left face down. The window you always stand at, not because the view is good but because it is yours to stand at.

This is what we think about when we think about finding a home. Not square footage. Not tube stops. The 3pm light. The window. The room that will hold the shape of you.

As Housefolk has grown — quietly, then quickly, the way these things do — questions have come up that we didn't entirely anticipate. Should we be a women's platform? We have toyed with this. We have had the conversation more than once, over more than one glass of wine. The answer we keep landing on is: we are mostly for women, in the way that a very good bookshop is mostly for a certain kind of person without putting a sign on the door. Men are welcome here. As long as they understand the assignment and are respectful. As long as they get behind our idea of sitting in rooms.

These questions — who is this for, what does home mean, what are we actually building — are not distractions from the work. They are the work. They are what makes us look at a Hammershøi instead of a floor plan.

So there it is: we are building a list of rooms worth sitting in. We thought you should know.