I am Mira Halvorsen.

I write quiet essays on the houses we actually live in, the objects that earn their square foot, and the design decisions that look subtractive on the surface and turn out to be additive in the end.

What this is

Home Design 21 is one essay every fortnight, written from a 60-square-metre apartment in a coastal European city. It is not a shopping magazine, not a haul newsletter, and not a feed of "ten objects under fifty dollars." It is somewhere between a thinking-out-loud journal and a small design column that takes restraint seriously enough to argue for it without sounding superior about it.

I cover three loose categories: the objects that have earned a place in my home, the small architectural decisions that change what daily life feels like inside an apartment, and the quieter conversations about design that get drowned out by the loud ones about taste.

What I review — and how

I only write reviews of objects I have personally used for at least thirty days in my actual home. Most of what gets written about lives here for sixty days or more before the essay goes up. I do not review on receipt. I do not review on a press kit. I have turned down sponsorships that did not allow this timeline, and I will continue to.

Some essays are sponsored. When they are, you will see a label at the very top of the page, a kicker tag above the article title, and a sponsor box inside the essay. If those three signals are not present, the essay is unsponsored and there is no commercial relationship between me and any object mentioned. Full editorial policy →

What I am not

Not an interior designer by training. Not an architect. Not a buyer for a retailer. I am one person writing in public about how a small apartment can hold the life of one or two people well, and which of the objects passing through it have earned their square foot.

Who I am

I am 39, half-Norwegian on my mother's side and half-American on my father's. I work in adjacent fields by day. I cook for my partner most weeknights and host friends on the weekends at a table that folds against the wall when it is not needed. The apartment is rented. The objects are owned outright.