About
The places that shape us.
A place is never just a location. It is a catalyst for who we become.
How it began
A question asked in too many rooms.
I was sitting in a hotel room in Lisbon that I could not have described ten minutes after leaving it. Clean, comfortable, completely forgettable. And I realised I had spent years advising on, designing, and moving between places that felt exactly like this one — interchangeable, well-intentioned, and fundamentally unable to answer the question of why anyone would want to be there.
That evening I started a list in a notebook. Places I remembered. Not the famous ones. The ones that had changed my breathing. A ryokan in Kyoto where silence was the main material. A farmhouse in Puglia where the table was older than anyone seated at it. A cabin in Norway so small it forced you to decide what mattered. The list grew, and so did a conviction: that the quality of our lives is inseparable from the quality of our places, and that we were no longer talking about this nearly enough.
Find Your Sense of Place began as a private correspondence with that conviction. It became a podcast when I realised that the people who built, kept, and thought about these places had stories that deserved a slower, more careful kind of attention than the world was currently offering them.
Our philosophy
We believe that where we are shapes who we become.
The places we inhabit teach us things words cannot. They set the pace of our days, shape the company we keep, and quietly form the questions we know how to ask.
This podcast is a slow study of that idea — through conversations with the people whose lives have been most thoughtfully arranged around it.
What is a sense of place?
A feeling, before it is a fact.
A sense of place is what happens when a landscape, a building, a neighbourhood, or a room becomes legible to you — when its rhythms align with your own and its details begin to feel familiar.
It is rarely the result of money or design alone. More often it is the residue of attention, repetition, and care.
Why this podcast exists
A long conversation, in public.
We live in an era of placelessness. Cities flatten into one another. Interiors look interchangeable. The textures that once told us where we were have been replaced by a softer, smoother global sameness.
Find Your Sense of Place is an attempt to reverse that drift — to listen carefully to the people still building, hosting, writing, and tending in ways that feel rooted.
The approach
Conversations that take their time.
Each episode is built around a single conversation, usually recorded where the guest lives or works, and usually lasting close to an hour. There are no rapid-fire questions. No pre-written segments. The goal is not to extract information but to follow a thread together and see where it leads.
The editing is minimal by design. You will hear pauses. You will hear rooms. You will occasionally hear a door close or a kettle boil in the background. These are not flaws. They are the acoustic texture of a conversation that happened in a real place, between two people paying attention.
What to expect
An hour spent in good company.
Episodes are released every two weeks. Each one introduces a person whose work has something essential to teach us about belonging — a hotelier who understands silence, an architect who builds with earth, a psychologist who studies why certain streets feel like home.
You do not need to listen in order. You do not need background in design, architecture, or psychology. You need only curiosity and, ideally, a window to look out of while you listen. The conversations are made for walking, for long drives, for slow Sunday mornings when the light is right and the coffee is still hot.
What we hold true
The principles behind every episode.
I
Slowness is a feature
We do not rush our conversations, our editing, or our recommendations. The best understanding of place takes time to arrive at, and we honour that pace.
II
Attention is the real luxury
What makes a place remarkable is rarely its cost. It is the accumulated evidence that someone cared — about the light, the material, the way a guest will feel at 6am.
III
Place is personal
A sense of place is not universal. It is negotiated between a person and a room, a street, a landscape. We respect that negotiation and do not pretend to speak for everyone.
IV
Conversation over content
We are not building a content machine. We are hosting a long, ongoing conversation. That means quality over quantity, and silence over noise.
"The places that work are not the most expensive ones. They are the most considered ones."
Samuel Vaden
About the host
Samuel Vaden
Place curator · storyteller · advisor
Samuel Vaden is a place curator, storyteller, and advisor who believes that environments shape our lives in profound ways. His work sits at the intersection of hospitality, design, and the slow craft of building something that lasts.
Over the past decade he has advised on hotels, residences, and cultural spaces across Europe, North America, and Asia - always with the same question at the centre: what would make a person feel that they belong here?
He writes the Journal, records the podcast, and occasionally leads small retreats in places he believes have something essential to teach. He lives between Lisbon and the coast of Maine, and is usually planning his next slow trip somewhere he has never been.
Through Find Your Sense of Place, he invites listeners into a longer, quieter conversation about belonging - one episode, one essay, and one carefully chosen room at a time.
Who we speak with
A community of people who care deeply.
Our guests are hoteliers, architects, psychologists, craftspeople, writers, and stewards of place. They are united not by industry but by a shared conviction: that the quality of our environments matters, and that building them well is one of the most important things a person can do.
Our listeners are travellers, hosts, designers, and the quietly curious. People who notice the angle of a chair, the quality of light in a particular hour, the way a doorway can make you feel expected. If you are reading this, you are almost certainly one of them.
Where we are headed
A media brand for place, slowly built.
The podcast is the beginning, not the end. In the months ahead we will publish deeper essays, field guides to specific places, and a small library of work by people who think about belonging for a living. There will be retreats - intimate, unhurried gatherings in places that have something to teach. There may eventually be a membership for those who want to go further together.
Everything we build will follow the same principle: slow, considered, and genuinely useful to the person who encounters it. If it does not meet that standard, it does not ship.
Our mission
To make the case - slowly, carefully, in the company of remarkable people - that the places we choose are among the most important decisions of our lives.