Four years of attempts to find a good life in industrial Eindhoven, the city of light: the exotic in the ultralocal, the entanglement of house and factory, the intimate and the rational. Energy spent avoiding isolation.

After school we moved together to Brussels, in a house on avenue Montjoie owned by minor Flemish nobility. Across from a small park and down the street from a large one. Solidly built in the first half of the twentieth century without us in mind.

We adapt it to our purposes as we search and work, balancing between burn-out and bore-out, figuring out what to do in a world of infinite urgencies where individual happiness seems always to lean on the exhaustion of countless others.

We bring with us through the Brenner Pass fragments of stories of friendship, dinners, bricolage, 400 coups; from Eindhoven to Brussels and from Brussels to Milan. Temporary solutions that have become permanent and specific findings that could be useful elsewhere.

We’re equipped with enough to build, cook, and publish. We hope to reach the promised hotel room, soon to be nested, cluttered, made soft and porous to the industrial and domestic legacy of the town.

Melancholia, sprezzatura haunting the streets, vodka and bitterness after lunch, Mastroianni fixing a lamp, the 24/7 Carrefour midnight worker, isolated 1 euro cafes, banana boxes and flea markets, the city’s answer to the question of how to live a good life.