We’d been in Florence less than a day when I started to notice it.
Not the city. Florence announces itself: the Duomo, the heat, the tourists, the noise, the sheer accumulated weight of five centuries of beauty pressing in on you from every direction. You can’t not notice Florence.
I’m talking about the apartment.
We were a full family on this trip, different generations, different tastes, different ideas of what makes a good holiday. And yet every one of us, independently, came back to the same word about the place we were staying. Wow.
Not a loud wow. A quiet one. The kind that creeps up on you.
The apartment wasn’t large. It wasn’t grand. It didn’t have a rooftop terrace or a view of the Arno. What it had was something harder to name and harder to replicate. It was a sense that every single thing in it had been chosen. Not accumulated. Not placed there because there was a gap on the shelf. Chosen.
The bedrooms were cool sanctuaries from the heat of the city. The art on the walls was an eclectic mix that had no obvious logic and somehow complete coherence. Someone with a good eye had hung those pieces, trusted their instinct, and stopped.
And then there was the coffee corner. A deep red Nespresso machine. Beside it, a modern perspex rectangle holding the capsules. Two objects. Both doing exactly one job. Both quietly beautiful. Together, just right.
That’s when the word came to me. Not decorated. Not furnished. Curated.
Someone had taken real time and care over this space. They understood colour. They understood the difference between timeless and fashionable, and had chosen timeless every time. They knew that form and function aren’t opposites, that a beautiful object can also be a useful one, that a useful object can also earn its place aesthetically. They knew when to stop.
The result was a space that gave us back energy rather than consuming it. In a hot, busy, tourist-crowded city, we had somewhere that asked nothing of us. It just worked. And because it worked, we could simply live in it.
I’ve been thinking about that apartment quite a bit.
Because most of us don’t curate our lives. We furnish them. We accumulate commitments, possessions, habits, obligations and before long the space is full but not quite right. Nothing is obviously wrong. But nothing was really chosen either.
What would it mean to apply that same careful eye to a life?
To ask of each thing, each commitment, each habit, each relationship, each way of spending a Tuesday – does this earn its place? Does it serve a purpose and do it beautifully? Is it timeless or just fashionable? Would I choose it again, knowing what I know?
That’s the question Florence left me with. Not from the Uffizi or the Ponte Vecchio though both are extraordinary. But from a apartment hidden behind a brown door, down an ordinary side street, where someone had thought carefully about what a space needed to do for the people in it.
And then had the discipline to stop there.
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