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# “Start With the People Who Stay”
- URL: https://columnist.themesbykyle.com/start-with-the-people-who-stay/
- Published: 2026-09-27T09:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-27T09:00:00.000Z
- Description: The designer Marit Solheim on libraries, permission and why a public room should never make people purchase their right to remain.
- Author: Ines Moreau-Walsh
- Tags: Ideas, Cities, #interview, #Import 2026-10-04 11:15

Marit Solheim has spent two decades designing libraries, reading rooms and civic halls across the north. We met in a café opposite one of her buildings to ask what makes a public room feel genuinely public: the difference between an attractive building and a place that people can use without continually explaining why they are there.

**Where would you begin a new library project?**

I would begin with the people who stay. Architectural drawings tend to describe movement beautifully: arrival, circulation, exit. But a library also needs to support somebody who is not going anywhere for the next hour. Where can that person sit? Can they hear themselves think? Can they look out of a window?

**Is that primarily a question of furniture?**

Furniture matters, but permission matters more. A room communicates permission through a hundred small decisions. A sign can be helpful or suspicious. A desk can offer assistance or feel like a checkpoint. The arrangement of a chair can suggest that you are welcome to pause or that you are expected to leave.

## The building after opening day

**What gets overlooked in the opening-day photograph?**

The ordinary systems. Where does a wet coat go? Who notices that a door has become difficult to open? Can a member of staff see enough of the room to help without making every visitor feel watched? Beautiful surfaces do not answer those questions by themselves.

**How do you avoid designing for an imaginary average visitor?**

By paying attention to specific days. A parent arriving with children. A reader who needs a quiet corner. Somebody learning the language. Somebody who has no reliable connection at home. You cannot resolve every need in one chair, but you can offer a range of places without arranging them into a hierarchy of who deserves comfort.

> A public room should not make people purchase their right to remain.

**What would you keep deliberately simple?**

The first five minutes. Finding the entrance, understanding where to ask a question, locating a toilet, seeing somewhere to sit. A good building does not need to announce how sophisticated it is at every opportunity. It can let people get on with their lives.

**And what would you measure a year later?**

I would ask which parts people have made their own and which parts they avoid. Then I would ask the staff what breaks, what causes confusion and what they have quietly adapted. The people who operate a building are often its most observant design critics.