Hey,
Crème de Sens is a journal about the quality of everyday life and what actually shapes it.
We tend to think about quality of life in broad terms: where we live, how much we earn, the opportunities we have, and what we can afford. But we don’t experience life through measures and indicators. We experience it through ordinary days. And the quality of those days has a lot to do with how much we actually enjoy our lives.
Ordinary days are made up of the home we return to in the evening, the streets we walk every day, the food we buy, the things we use, the places we go, the service we receive, and the people we encounter. They are also made up of noise, light, smells, distances, rules, and dozens of other things that often seem too insignificant to think seriously about.
On their own, many of these things really are small. But when the same small things repeat every day, they stop being small. They shape our everyday experience: how much pleasure, comfort, irritation, interest, or unnecessary friction it contains. Over time, that experience becomes part of how our life feels as a whole.
That is what interests me.
Having lived in very different countries, I began to notice that objectively good conditions do not always translate into a good everyday experience and that the opposite can also be true.
Crème de Sens begins with the idea that quality of life is neither entirely personal nor entirely external. It emerges in the relationship between who we are and the environments, systems and cultures we move through. The same conditions can allow one person to expand and cause another to withdraw. This journal examines those often overlooked interactions and the distance between a life that appears good and one that actually feels good to live.
In this journal, I explore that question through personal experience and observation — looking at spaces, cities, food, service, social environments, habits, and ordinary situations. Sometimes that means writing about good design or an excellent restaurant. Other times, it means looking at a poorly designed street, a mediocre product, or poor service that people have simply learned to accept as normal.
I am not interested in dividing the world into beautiful and ugly, good and bad. I want to understand why certain things improve an ordinary day and why others quietly diminish it. Because a good life is not only about holidays, future plans, or major achievements. Most of it is made up of ordinary days.
— A
