Chapter III | A Place of One’s Own
From September 6 to October 7, 2026, noisé reading room takes up residence at Design Republic’s DR Home for a month-long presentation.
Titled A PLACE OF ONE’S OWN, the project is inspired by Real Estate, the final volume of British writer Deborah Levy’s “living autobiography” trilogy. Levy begins with a fantasy of owning the perfect house, but the house soon becomes a way of thinking about desire, freedom, and the life one wants to make: What do we actually want? And what does it mean to have a place of one’s own?
These questions bring noisé reading room and Design Republic into conversation.
Founded by Lyndon Neri and Rossana Hu, Design Republic has long explored the relationship between design and everyday life through furniture, objects, and space. Design Commune, its home in Shanghai, occupies a historic building dating from 1909, restored and transformed by Neri&Hu Design and Research Office. Within it, DR Home places furniture and objects in a domestic setting, at the scale and intimacy of a home.
Rather than occupying a separate reading space, noisé reading room is integrated into the different rooms and living areas of DR Home. More than sixty books selected around the theme, alongside past issues of noisé, appear on dining tables, sofas, bedside tables, desks, beside the bathtub, and on the balcony. Like clues scattered through a house, they are discovered as visitors move from room to room, stop, sit, and read.
Photographs by Benedict Brink, Lena C. Emery, Rita Lino, Tang Siyu, and Milena Villalón, as well as works on paper by Christine Corday, are drawn from previous chapters of noisé reading room and placed within these domestic spaces, creating new relationships with books, furniture, and everyday objects.
Books, art, and design are no longer encountered as separate objects, but as elements of an environment to be read, used, noticed, and lived with.
A PLACE OF ONE’S OWN is less about the house itself than the person who inhabits it: how we want to live, and what we choose to live with.
Special thanks to Design Republic