A long table in the south

We had a terrace, growing up. In the center of our village, in the Swiss Jura, right by a small road on which my friends and I used to play, with few cars but plenty of foot traffic. Every year, when days were getting warmer and longer, my parents would set the table out. And on Fridays, when my dad came home from work, we’d “prendre l’apéro” (have an apéritif). Anyone passing by was invited up – the neighbours, my dad’s colleagues, friends, the postman, or an aunt and uncle who happened to be there. My mom always seemed to put together more food than we needed. We may not have been rich in money, but we were rich in life, warmth, and heart.

I did not understand at the time that this was a philosophy. I thought it was just what tables were for.

When I was a teenager, I left home for school and never quite went home in the way I had been there. The table kept going without me. It actually moved houses and kept going. But it sits in the back of my head, and over the last few years it has come forward, asking a question I did not invite.

What if the work, eventually, is to build that terrace again. At a different scale. On purpose this time. What if creating that type of experience actually runs in the family? My grandmother had a restaurant, in which, if I understood the stories (and saw the pictures) correctly, parties were… wild. My mom had her terrace and worked in restaurants. I probably inherited some of their sense of hospitality.

I’m lucky to share this with a partner who carries the same values – and who is, for what it’s worth, one of the kindest humans I know. We’re now dreaming, and scheming, together about the table, the house, the place.

The place is in the south. The exact south is still being chosen – there are a few candidates, each with their own argument. The geography matters less than the geometry. A long table. A garden. Stone that has seen weather. A view that takes the noise out of you before you have sat down. Twelve or fifteen rooms, not more. A studio for an artist in residence. A small annex for people who need a refuge, a job and a home – because the one they grew up in stopped being safe. And a pool that is as much for sitting next to as for swimming in. None of which is the central feature. The central feature is the table.

Around the table will be our guests, some of them quietly carrying things they have not put down for a long time. Around the table will also be young people who were thrown out of homes that should have kept them, working in this house that takes them in, learning a craft they can leave with. They will not be a program. They will be staff. The dignity of being staff, of being someone’s colleague, of being paid – that is the point, and not the marketing.

And around the table, less obviously, will be artists. Who get a studio for a season in exchange for the work they leave behind. The boutique sells the work. A share of what the boutique sells funds the next young person or artist who needs a place.

It will not be loud. It is not a party – it is sometimes a party. In the village they will know us as the ones with the table, with food and wine on Saturdays for whoever shows up.

And now you may wonder: why am I writing about a place I have not yet built, on a website where I am also taking on fractional work?

Two reasons.

The first is honesty. I am not in tech because I have nowhere else to be. I am here because the work matters, the people are interesting, and there is real craft in helping a leader see something they could not see alone. None of that is less true because of the table in the south. If anything, it is more true. The table is what the work is for.

The second is that the work and the table are the same skill at different scales. Build a space where a person can put down what they are carrying. Hold a story honestly. Make room for what is hard to say. Let the difficult conversation happen at a pace it can handle. I have been practising this in meeting rooms for fifteen years. The garden is just a different room.

If you are reading this because we are talking about working together: this is the world I am working from. Not the world I am leaving for. The horizon is the horizon, the road is the road, and they are not in conflict.

If you are reading this and you have your own version of the table somewhere – a thing you are walking toward, that you do not yet know how to talk about – I am paying attention to people like you these days. Tell me about it sometime.

–S.