You get to build your perfect space for reading and writing. What’s it like?
There is a room in the house that isn’t quite a room.
Too small to be a bedroom, too lived-in to be storage,
too full of sunlight to be forgotten.
It sits on the edge of the family room,
like a hinge in the house—
a space that opens and closes depending on what the day needs.
This is where I read.
This is where I write.
This is where morning light brushes my skin and wakes the work inside me.
I’ve written in many places before this one:
a bedroom shared with my brother when I was at school and university,
a garage wall with a generous window,
sunny rooms that never asked to become studies but did anyway.
Each of them was a doorway into a different season of my life.
This one is no different.
Downstairs, a grand study waits—forty square metres of dark furniture and colder air.
It looks like the sort of room where serious work should happen,
but it never has.
Some rooms have discipline but no invitation.
Some rooms have everything but welcome.
So it holds books, but not me.
Instead, I sit here—eight square metres of east-facing warmth.
A desk.
A window full of morning.
An old four-seater lounge that just fits, yet still manages to hold the whole family.
Sometimes I’m mid-sentence when footsteps enter,
and suddenly the dog, the cat, and my wife are here—
four presences in a room built for one.
And strangely, it doesn’t break the spell.
It deepens it.
Because this room is not an escape.
It’s a threshold.
A place where solitude meets companionship.
Where concentration leans against the sound of life happening nearby.
Where the work of writing and the work of loving are not adversaries,
but neighbours who share a wall.
Some rooms exist within a house.
This one exists between things.
Between silence and conversation.
Between attention and affection.
Between the self that creates and the self that belongs.
A room that does not shut the world out,
but invites it to knock—quietly, gently, at the edge of the page.
The Afterword 
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