Index
Haus Journal: The Third Room
- Essay by Kaylee Kepple
Primary Works by Virginia Woolf
1. Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. London: Hogarth Press, 1929.
2. Woolf, Virginia. “The Third Room.” In The Death of the Moth and Other Essays. London: Hogarth Press, 1942.
3. Woolf, Virginia. Moments of Being. Edited by Jeanne Schulkind. London: Hogarth Press, 1976.
4. Woolf, Virginia. The Waves. London: Hogarth Press, 1931. (For its meditations on inner life and solitary creative perception.)
Works Resonant with the ‘Third Room’ Concept
5. Didion, Joan. The White Album. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979. (Especially essays on personal interiors and public selves.)
6. Babitz, Eve. Eve’s Hollywood. New York: New York Review Books, 2015. (Memoir-as-room: the dreamy, sensorial space of the self.)
7. Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities. New York: Harcourt, 1974. (For metaphorical spaces as mental and emotional states.)
8. Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994. (Philosophical exploration of interior spaces and imagination.)
Contemporary Reflections on Creative & Sacred Spaces
9. hooks, bell. Art on My Mind: Visual Politics. New York: New Press, 1995. (On art-making as an act of self-definition and sanctuary.)
10. Smith, Zadie. “That Crafty Feeling.” The Believer, 2008. (On the private process of writing and creative retreat.)
She was always circling the problem of consciousness which is to say the problem of living at all. She wrote as if time were a tide and she were both standing on the shore and already being carried out. She understood the undertow being the long illness of the mind, and stone in the pocket.
What remains is not only the work but the way she made the work feel inevitable — as if it could not have been otherwise, and the only way to survive the act of living was to write it down while it was still happening.
Virginia Woolf also taught us that a woman needs a room of her own. To write, think, and simply exist without being endlessly interrupted. In The Third Room, she takes it further — beyond the practical sanctuary into something subtler: the psychic annex. If the first room is the world’s, and the second is for rest, the third is a territory with no lease. It is the internal atelier where self learns to stretch without witness.
Haus of Terzetto feels like the architectural echo of that third room. Not simply a workspace, not merely a refuge — a place where the boundaries between “out there” and “in here” blur. You can paint until your coffee goes cold, talk to strangers in a language made of glances, or spend hours reading without shifting your chair.
In The Third Room, Woolf isn’t just protecting the artist’s time, she’s safeguarding the return. You go there to get lost — deliberately, luxuriantly — so you can find the thread that leads you home.
While we may say we are here at Haus to create and be inspired, we are really just following Woolf’s map. Walking into that third sacred space where the world loosens its grip and, when we leave, carry it with us. The room, the light, the unspoken permission to be entirely our own.
In this Third Room, you realize you’ve been rehearsing your return without even knowing it. Growing in circles, spiraling inward toward that private address where you keep the first drafts of yourself.
A sacred space (if truly sacred) is not where you end up; but where you turn back toward yourself, unhurried, and start the walk home.