From The Stories Issue
In Species of Spaces, Georges Perec lists the places he would wish to exist —birthplace, family seat, the tree his father might have planted on the day of his birth —before conceding that such places don’t exist and that it is because they don’t exist that space becomes a question, ceases to be selfevident, ceases to be appropriated, becomes a doubt. The room Charlotte Taylor is currently working in is not the answer to Perec’s catalogue of impossible places, but she has arrived at something adjacent to a reply: a working interior that travels with her and gets set up wherever the next commission requires.
Habitually made up of a sketchbook, a black ballpoint, a striped shirt, a tape measure, a hardback book or two open and weighted, a knife from the kitchen brought to the desk, the lamp angled low —the same elements captured on six surfaces across four countries between May and August 2026, each one photographed as she has arranged it and accompanied by a postcard (to me) from inside it. The postcards run through these pages as her voice from each room; part of a documentation of the practices that compose her temporary interior, assembled before a client’s space can begin to be drawn from it.
OOO is the out-of-office reply, and, read another way, an inventory: object, object, object.
Between the last day of May and the last day of July I received a dozen postcards. Perec once made an entire book of invented ones — Two Hundred and Forty- Three Postcards in Real Colour, dedicated to Italo Calvino, every message assembled from five parts: places, considerations, pleasures, particulars, greetings. Charlotte’s are real, but a system is a system; I have sorted hers into his drawers and let the middle three spill into one another.
Places
A terrace in Gaucin, Andalucía, which serves as office by day and dining room by night. — A room on Filicudi, ten bottles of wine having arrived intact in transit. — A corner balcony three hundred metres above the Alicudi harbour. — A 70s hotel on Salina. — A repurposed WW2 stretcher on a terrace in Cefalù, serving as the morning office. — London, once, briefly. — A riverbank in Porto after a day in the workshops. — A shopping-mall canteen in the outer suburbs of Porto, under a plastic sign reading I LOVE KEBABS. — A bedroom desk in Le Perche, facing a forest and, latterly, three goats.
Perec’s was a catalogue of stable places that do not exist. Charlotte’s cards assemble, without meaning to, the working designer’s version: places that last anywhere from a few days to a fortnight each, each one timestamped in the top corner like a reporter filing from
the field.
Considerations, pleasures & particulars
The first card arrives from Gaucin at the end of May, on the back of a pastel drawing of a Bichon Frisé. Her site visit has been conducted on horseback. On the descent she is infested with spiders, strips in front of the local dogs’ shelter, improvises a shower with her water bottle, and loses one Nike sock. She has adopted a sheep called Carlito from the pen next door and is proposing to bring him back to France. This has to be the most animal-heavy site visit thus far, she writes, for the good and the bad.
From Filicudi, in early June: two striped shirts (made by our friend in Athens) already strewn around the room, mosquito spray and a novel by the bed, no sudoku anywhere on the island. I feel lost without my morning puzzle, she writes and sets off on foot to look for one. When the search fails, she starts drawing her own. I have one here as I write — a full nine-by-nine grid in thick black marker on the letterhead of the Hôtel Balzac in Paris, all eighty-one cells solved in her own numerals, posted to me without a note. Perec, who was frightened of the empty page and spent a writing life inventing rules to get past it, set a weekly crossword for Le Point and called his puzzles singing scales, the daily practice behind the sustained compositions. He would have understood at a glance the young woman in the hotel, drawing herself a grid before breakfast.
The Alicudi card is marked 6:14am. The house is a three-hundred-metre climb from the harbour (no roads, no cars, the luggage goes up by mule) and in the last hundred metres she convinces a cat to follow her and names it Albertine. A corner office is established on the top balcony, overspilled with books, and undersupplied with ideas. She learns that until the 1950s the islanders were unknowingly dosing themselves with LSD through a fungus in their rye bread, that the church has since ruled the affected loaves ‘devil’s bread’. Two days later she reads The Eyes of the Skin in one sitting, discovers she has somehow packed two copies, and posts me the spare. The card that comes with it is signed
Love from the outside office.
The outside office. OOO: out of office; also, read another way, object, object, object. What doesn’t travel with her gets improvised on arrival. From Cefalù she photographs her morning office, a repurposed WW2 stretcher on the terrace. More chic than it sounds, she writes, and it is.
Salina supplies a beach holiday within the working holiday and a cat resembling Dante, her tabby in England. On the morning of the flight out, the kitchen pipe bursts, and she writes to me ankle-deep in water, answering client emails from her phone. Such fun. She is not being sarcastic.
Then, from Porto, the sentence the whole summer had been building toward. The past weeks have become so nomadic, all sense of place is lost, which I can’t decide whether it’s beautiful or traumatic. My sketchbooks and — a word I cannot make out — have become my sense of office and home. Small consistency is my sanity. That is the piece, in her own eleven words. The kit is the working infrastructure of a practice that has to produce a room for someone else, out of whatever room she is currently sitting in.
The day after Porto she is in the shoppingmall canteen under the kebab sign, having her most productive email session of the month. Non-places are such an efficient space for me, she writes, unknowingly shaking hands with an entire school of French anthropology. Perec once spent three afternoons in a café on the Place Saint-Sulpice writing down everything that passed — the buses, the pigeons, the light — on the theory that the unnoticed everyday was the thing most worth noticing. Her card reads like a dispatch from the same café, sixty years on, with fluorescent ambience.
By late July the correspondence has a cast: Carlito; Albertine; a nod to Dante; Napoleon, smallest of the new sheep at Le Perche; and three baby goats, collected between Zoom meetings — I had my first coffee at 6am with them sitting in the hay. The London card, the only one sent from her home studio (surrounded by loose papers and copious pencil shavings is clearly my happy place), is the still point the others orbit: London is the O, everywhere else is the OO, for now. The last envelope comes from Le Perche, where the potager is thriving, where she detests the cucumbers and melons it insists on producing but has hopes for the artichokes, and where she now attends her meetings in wellington boots.
There are words in these cards I have never managed to make out. My plan was to have Charlotte read everything aloud and clear up any misunderstandings, but at a table in Le Perche in August, with the cards spread out between us, we decided against it. Perec built a deliberate flaw into every system he made — his hundred-room novel has ninetynine chapters, the missing one eaten, he maintained, by a girl on a biscuit tin — on the principle that a perfect system is a dead one. Misunderstandings seemed, under his influence, less like carelessness than craftsmanship, and so, we have let them be.
Greetings
Sunny love from the balcony. — Love from the outside office. — Love from poolside. — Love from wet kitchen. — Love from under the vines. — Love from the garden. — And, at the end of July, from Le Perche: Love Charlotte (+3). The three being the baby goats named (I can now reveal) Perec, Puck, and Perriand, who on the morning of the final postcard are standing outside her window in a row, watching her sketch intently. I have stopped being able to tell whether I am writing an homage to Georges Perec, or taking dictation from his namesake goat.
