On working from other people's rooms.

The Glasgow scullery was eight feet by eleven feet, lit by a single high window that faced, with what felt like deliberate inconvenience, an identical scullery across an airshaft. I worked there for nine days in March of last year. I had been told it was a converted pantry, which turned out to be a polite way of saying it was a pantry with a desk in it. I rented it from a woman named Margaret, who lived above me with a cat called Hamish and a strong opinion about heating bills. I paid her seventy-two pounds for the week and an extra five for tea, which she brought down at eleven each morning, on a tray, without saying a word.

I had come to Glasgow to finish a piece of writing I had been failing to finish for fourteen months. I finished it on the seventh day. I have thought, since, about whether that was the room or the weather or Margaret's tea or simply the accumulated pressure of fourteen months of not finishing — and I have come to the unscientific conclusion that it was the room. Specifically, that it was the room because it was not mine. That what I had needed, for fourteen months, was a place where I was, very politely, a guest.

That was the eleventh of the forty-three rooms. Between October 2024 and April 2026 I worked from forty-three of them — in twelve cities, six countries, on three continents — under the broad heading of an experiment I was running on myself. The experiment was this: that the best place to do my work was almost certainly not in the room I owned and had decorated and was paying the mortgage on. That my own room had, over the years, accumulated too much of my own opinion. That to write well I needed to be, briefly and respectfully, inside someone else's.

The cost of a familiar desk

I am a writer. I am also, by training and disposition, a homebody. For most of my working life I have written from a single desk in a single room of my own apartment, in a Lisbon neighborhood I have lived in since I was twenty-six. The desk is a good desk. The room is a good room. The light is more than adequate. I have, by any reasonable standard, the ideal conditions for my work.

And yet, increasingly, the work has not gotten done in that room. Or rather: the easy work has gotten done in that room — the emails, the drafts of drafts, the small commissioned pieces that pay the rent — and the harder work, the real work, has consistently failed to begin there. I would sit at the desk. I would open the file. I would write four sentences, delete three, and begin to consider whether the kitchen needed reorganizing.

A friend who is a therapist once told me, in a different context, that the rooms we live in are full of our own past selves. That every chair is also the chair where we cried in 2017, and every kettle is also the kettle that boiled the morning we received bad news, and every angle of light contains every previous angle of light we have ever stood inside. She did not mean this in a haunted way. She meant it as a kind of physics: that a room, lived in long enough, becomes saturated with autobiography, and that autobiography is not always what you want between you and a blank page.

A room, lived in long enough, becomes saturated with autobiography — and autobiography is not, always, what you want between you and a blank page.

I started looking for other rooms in the autumn of 2024, when a piece I had been working on for nearly a year refused, again, to come together. I rented the first one almost as a joke — a flat above a watchmaker in Porto, twenty-eight euros for an afternoon, with a window onto a shipyard. I went up the stairs, sat down at a small painted table, and wrote, with no real effort, twelve hundred words I had been unable to write at my own desk for ten months. They were good words. I have not, since, changed any of them.

It would be neat to say I understood, in that moment, what was happening. I did not. I assumed, on the train home, that the watchmaker's flat had simply been a lucky room — a one-time accident of light and altitude and the particular comfort of a hard chair — and that my desk, on Monday, would resume its usual functions. It did not. I sat down on Monday and produced nothing.

So I rented another room. A reading nook above a bookshop in Coimbra. Six hours, eighteen euros. I wrote nineteen hundred words. The following week: a kitchen in Setúbal, with a view of the salt marshes. Two thousand. The week after: a chapel office, deconsecrated in the seventies, in a village I had never heard of in the Alentejo. Three thousand.

That was the first month. By the second month I had stopped pretending this was a phase.

What other rooms do, exactly

I want to be careful here, because there is a temptation, when writing this kind of essay, to construct a theory that is grander and tidier than the experience warrants. I do not have a grand theory. What I have is a set of small, mostly contradictory observations, accumulated over forty-three rooms, which I will offer in the order in which they occurred to me.

The first is that other people's rooms contain other people's attention. Margaret's scullery in Glasgow was, in every detail, the product of a lifetime of choices that were not mine. The particular placement of the shelf above the desk. The chipped enamel on the windowsill. The lampshade — a 1970s paper sphere — that someone, at some point, had decided was the right lampshade for this room. To sit inside that accumulation of choices was, for me, a form of relief. I did not have to decide anything. The room had been decided.

The second is that other people's rooms enforce a useful politeness. In my own home I can sigh, stand up, walk in circles, open the fridge, close the fridge, return to the desk, sigh again. In a stranger's room I cannot — or rather, I can, but every such action costs more. The room is, at some level, watching. Not in a haunted way. In a neighborly way. I have, in forty-three rented rooms, opened a fridge that was not mine exactly twice, and both times felt I had done something I would later need to apologize for.

The third observation is the one I am still least sure about. It is that the work, in a stranger's room, comes out slightly different. Not better, necessarily — though sometimes better. Just different. As if my own voice, lifted briefly out of its usual furniture, sounds to itself in a new register, and writes accordingly. The pieces I finished in those forty-three rooms read, when I look at them now, as a kind of collected travelogue of my own attention — each one bearing faint traces of the room it was written in, in ways I cannot always put my finger on but which I am, on a second reading, certain of.

An incomplete inventory

I will not catalog all forty-three. But here are the ones I think about most often.

The drafting table in Mexico City, in a Roma Norte apartment belonging to an architect named Diego, who left me a thermos of coffee and a single sentence on a Post-it: "Please do not move the parallel rule." I did not move it. I wrote, in two mornings, the most generous piece of writing I have produced in my career. I have, more than once, considered moving to Mexico City for the sole purpose of returning to that table. I have not, of course, done so.

The converted laundry in Athens, where I worked for three days in February of last year, in a Koukaki apartment owned by a translator named Anastasia. There were two clotheslines still strung across the ceiling. She had refused to take them down. She thought they were what the room was for. I came, over three days, to agree with her, and have left the clotheslines in my own laundry up ever since.

The monk's reading nook in Kyoto, which I rented for a single afternoon for what worked out to nineteen dollars and which did not, exactly, produce any writing. I sat in it for three hours and wrote forty words. I then sat in it for another hour and wrote none. I do not consider it a failed visit. I consider it, in fact, the most important of the forty-three.

I came to understand, eventually, that I was not renting rooms. I was renting somebody else's tolerance for an afternoon. And that tolerance, accepted with care, was the whole point.

The puppet-maker's loft in Marvila, on the eastern edge of Lisbon, which I rented for a whole week last summer and where I shared the space, for several afternoons, with a marionette of a fisherman who had been, the puppet-maker told me, halfway through construction for a decade. We worked alongside each other companionably. He never finished. Neither, that week, did I.

And many more, of course. Forty-three is a lot of rooms. The strange thing — the thing I did not expect — is that I remember almost all of them with a precision I rarely manage with rooms in my own home. Whatever each one cost me (the most expensive was eighty-four euros; the cheapest was four), each came with a sharp, specific clarity I have come to think of as the dividend of being a guest.

Coming home

It is now April, and the experiment is, in some practical sense, over. I have moved back into my own apartment. My own desk. My own light. I am writing this essay from it, and the essay has not, despite my worries, been any harder to write here than it might have been elsewhere.

But the apartment has changed, or I have. I have rearranged the furniture three times since I got back. I have moved the desk to the other window. I have, perhaps significantly, hung up a paper lampshade I bought, at no small inconvenience, on my way back through Glasgow, in homage to the one over Margaret's desk. The lampshade looks slightly wrong here, but I intend to keep it. It is the visible residue of an idea I do not want to lose.

The idea, if I can phrase it without overstating, is this: that the familiar place is not always the best place. That a writer — or perhaps any of us — owes our work the small generosity of an occasional unfamiliar room. That to work, sometimes, from somebody else's view is to lend our own attention briefly to their care, and to receive, in exchange, a kind of attention back that our own walls can no longer provide.

I plan to keep renting. Less than once a month, now, but enough. I already have a room booked for July in Naples, above a barber's shop that has, according to the listing, "a single chair, an excellent fan, and the sound of a man named Roberto trimming beards." I have, of course, already paid in full.