No training, no design school. A childhood, four apartments, three houses, and one expensive lesson.
“Home was never just a building. It was a feeling you carried with you.”
Okay, let me say this the way I would say it to a friend, because I get asked some version of it constantly. Where did the eye come from? Who taught you this? What was the training?
There was no training. There was a childhood, four apartments, three houses, and one very expensive lesson. That is the whole answer.
But it is worth telling properly, because I think the way an eye actually develops is nothing like how people imagine it does.
The homes I grew up in and around were built for family. Warm, grounding, full of life. There was a safety to them. A sense that wherever you were in the world, home would hold you.
Here is the part that stayed with me. We did not choose the furniture. Or the colours. Or the layout. None of it was decided by us in any deliberate way. And somehow those spaces still felt completely like us.
I did not understand what that meant for years. But it is the thing I have been chasing ever since. That a room can feel like the people in it without anyone having designed it to.
I was fortunate to grow up around beauty. Homes with real taste, spaces that were considered, surrounded by people who understood that how you live reflects who you are.
Nobody sat me down and explained any of it. It went in sideways, the way most real education does. And it quietly shaped an eye I did not yet know I was developing.
When I left for college, I carried all of it with me. The warmth, the instinct, the standard. And I started, slowly, to build it for myself.
The second apartment was where I first made intentional decisions about a space. Not just filling it. Actually thinking about what it should feel like before I bought anything.
It was not particularly good. But it was the first time the instinct was doing something on purpose. I just did not have language for any of it yet.
This is the one I still think about.
A rented space, nothing structural I could change, working within someone else’s walls and someone else’s floors. And it came together in a way that felt entirely mine. Considered. Layered. Intentional in a way I could finally see rather than just feel.
I remember standing in that room and understanding, properly, that I had developed a real eye. Not borrowed taste. Not a copy of something I had seen. Mine.
What that apartment taught me
“You do not need to own a space to make it yours. You need to know what you are going for.”
That is still the most useful thing I know. And it is why I take renters as seriously as homeowners, because the constraint is not the problem people think it is.
Owning a space changed the timeline more than anything else. I could commit fully. To decisions that would take two years to finish. To pieces I would have to save for. To a vision I did not have to justify to a landlord or rush before a lease ended.
Every choice became deliberate. Every object had to earn its place. And I started to understand that patience is not a personality trait in this work. It is a method.
Then I got it completely wrong.
Both of my children were born in that house, which changed everything about how I thought about a space. It had to be warm enough for a family, beautiful enough to feel like home, safe enough to grow in. I was designing with them in mind from the very beginning.
And I still followed a trend straight into a home that never felt like ours.
I have written about that in full elsewhere. What the farmhouse moment did, why it was so hard to resist, and how I eventually pulled it back. But the short version is this. It was my least favourite home I have ever lived in. Not because it was ugly. Because it was not mine.
That feeling — of living in a space that does not quite speak your name — is the most useful thing that has ever happened to my work.
This home is where everything I have learned is being expressed without holding back. A conversation between eras, between drama and restraint, between the warmth I grew up around and the sharper, stranger things I am drawn to now.
It is also the home that gave Kerr its name. Kerr means home in Wolof, the language I think in as often as I think in English. That word has followed me across every country and every chapter, and it means the same thing in both languages.
Not a building. A feeling. A way of saying: this is who we are.
“The eye did not come from a school. It came from paying very close attention, for a very long time, to how spaces make people feel.”
— Ameena, Kerr
Tell me about it. I read every one of these myself and I answer them properly. No templates, no pitch.