The Jean Prouvé Door Between Us

On thresholds, separation, and the growing pains of design

I meant to be here sooner. Work has been full, life has been fuller. Then there was the flu, we were all going down like dominoes, missing Design Week, the Domenico Gnoli show, and the general crush of family life. Honestly, I just lost the thread for a bit.

Somewhere in there, we shot a campaign with Sabah x Misha & Puff, which I was lucky enough to style. My kids, as always, arrived like a burst of color and voltage…somehow prepared, completely natural, and ready for the camera, whether it was a full campaign or the smallest snapshot. The level of confidence I strive for daily.

I guess the things you wrestle with can become the things your kids arrive already knowing. Or so I’d like to think.

And yet, moments like that always remind me how quickly time is moving, how these tiny versions of them are changing in real time, and how grateful I am to capture little pieces of them—of us—along the way.

Maybe that’s why what happened next hit me the way it did.

The other night, Phoenix (almost nine) asked for a… DOOR!

My heart dropped before I fully understood why. In the kids’ room, there’s a divider I designed, and I intentionally left out the acrylic so they could run back and forth between their rooms. It made sense for the way they lived then.

The door she asked for gave shape to a shift already underway.

Somewhere in my mind, I was still seeing the room as it had been, and her within it, still moving through that opening to her brother’s side, as if that arrangement had more time in it.

Of course, the signs have been there. Her almost-tween years seem to be catapulting in mysterious little ways around her room, starting with the newest addition: a TIN-CAN landline, apparently all the rage among her peers. IYKYK.

And that is the thing about interiors: they are always answering a moment, even when we like to pretend they are permanent.

Home is never stagnant. Some people are always bringing things in, moving things around, letting a house evolve in plain sight. Others live among the same curtains and chairs for decades (and yes, hello to every millennial who got stuck to a plastic-covered couch at their grandparents’ house).But no home is ever truly still. Time moves through it. People change inside it. Rooms absorb those shifts long before anyone says them out loud.

So, I designed one inspired by Jean Prouvé’s Panneau à hublots—wooden, spare and punctuated with circular openings. Less industrial than the original, more intimate. In keeping with the design logic already in the room, I wanted the door to continue borrowing light from Phoenix’s side into the next, and the hublots felt like the clearest way to do that.

They were never just decorative. They let the door hold onto light and connection while still functioning as a boundary. They remind me of portholes, almost, softening the severity of the flat surface. A large solid plane can feel heavy but the circles break it up and give it cadence.

I didn’t want total closure. I wanted something that could hold a boundary without losing all sense of connection.

Because what looked like a design decision was also something else: an articulation of privacy, independence, and a room beginning to belong to its occupant in a different way. Not through anything loud or declarative, but through an object. A boundary. A surface. A passage from one state into another.

That is what I keep returning to in domestic design: at home, design rarely stays formal for long. A chair becomes a habit. A lamp becomes a mood. A table becomes a record of who gathers, who lingers, who has left. The objects we live with end up carrying much more than taste. They absorb timing, identity, need, and change.

A door may be the clearest example of this. It is never only a door. It is access, separation, invitation, refusal, protection, autonomy. It tells you how a space is meant to function, but also how a person wants to live inside it. In that sense, the Jean Prouvé language feels especially apt: design that does not overexplain itself, yet says exactly what it needs to say.

What changed for me was realizing how quickly an admired object can become a lived one. How form can take on emotional weight the minute it enters the choreography of a real home. The wooden door in Phoenix and Cy’s room is not there as homage, not really. It is there because it answers something.It makes visible a new way of occupying space.

Maybe that is why the best interiors never feel frozen, no matter how composed they appear. They are always in conversation with the people inside them. They register growth. They accommodate new desires. They reveal changing boundaries. Good design does not resist that movement; it frames it. Its lets a life become legible.

And sometimes all of that arrives through one object.

This is what design does at its best: it gives shape to change and form to time.

Though the door is still awaiting its final coat and one precious little handle, even unfinished, it already feels like a portal, one I am not fully ready for, a sign of growing up made visible through design.

Things I’m Loving This Week

….Because inspiration is rarely linear.

BODE

THIS BODE HAT… summer is coming… A summer of hats, paired with everything. Nothing chicer than a fun hat with the most minimal dress.

No. 6 Jellies

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DIMWIT

Guys… Emma Apple Chozick of gr8 collab reached out on behalf of DIMWIT and they sent me the most beautiful, mouthwatering pieces of decor. And not the usual kind: light switches.

I’ve been walking around my home trying to figure out the exact right place to install them, because they deserve their moment. I must do them justice.

Look at them. They are literally jewelry.

You know how people say handles are the handshake of the home? I mean… can we say the same for light switches? Because these are definitely greeting people before I do.

BEEF

Better than Season 1. There, I said it.

All clothes are now in my ShopMy and you can read the full Sabah x Misha & Puff journal here.

What’s one small change in your home that ended up meaning more than you expected?

If anything here opened a small door for you, tell me! I love hearing what others are noticing. And if you know someone who would appreciate this kind of slow, design-forward attention, pass it along. These conversations travel best person to person.

xx,

Merie