Before we discovered this old Saxon house in Transylvania, we dreamed of creating a place of our own shaped by light. More precisely, by the way natural light and shadow move through a house at different hours and in different seasons. We imagined the delicate shadows trees might cast on a wall or inside a room, and how light would slowly reveal objects, shapes and colours.
But we fell in love with this house and felt that our plans about light would have to be set aside. You do not add windows or make major changes to a house you want to restore and keep as authentic as possible. At the time, we thought it might be a compromise to choose a rural home built in 1850, in a small village, by people who surely did not share our sensitivities, shaped perhaps by photography, Japanese cinema and literature, or Eastern architecture.
Now we know we underestimated how a rural house in this region was built more than 170 years ago. Perhaps the people of that time did not speak the same artistic language, but they had a deep connection with nature, an instinct for building in a way that lasts, and a quiet, practical wisdom. Even more than us, they paid close attention to light and understood its importance.
Today, in many parts of the world, there are rooms without windows or with poorly placed ones, where light slips in only briefly, thin and strained. After centuries in which people knew that sunlight inside a home meant health, as seen for example in ancient Rome, we seem to have forgotten, or perhaps been forced to pretend we have forgotten, how much we need it.
Artificial light is extraordinary and we have every reason to appreciate it. Yet its presence has never made the light of sunrise less moving. It has never made shadows less fascinating, nor has it ever rivalled the splendour of a sunset. There is something within us that still knows sunlight does us good.
When this house was built, someone surely thought carefully about how light would enter. Did they know it helps keep us balanced and well? Or that our sense of beauty depends so deeply on it? Perhaps their thinking was practical rather than artistic. Still, they did something remarkable, because the light at AlmaCalma, at different hours and in different seasons, truly does us good, as it does the plants. It allows this house, with its objects, colours and textures, to appear in countless ways, making it feel constantly alive. The shadows of roses on the white walls, the garden changing from morning to late night, the strength with which anything you plant grows, all suggest that light has always mattered here and has shaped the way the house and its outbuildings were placed, the way the garden and the hill behind the house have been used.
In a good house, light is a poem written again and again. And even if we think we no longer read poetry, something within us still does.
Photos: Cromatica Photography
