“If it’s going back even after many years, definitely smell. It brings you right back.”
— Christiane Büssgen
Christiane Büssgen answered us from a desk by Sergio Rodrigues, inside Espasso in New York. She knows the piece well. The gallery has been one of her favorite places to go for inspiration since she arrived in the city, and a few months ago she started working there. Sitting at an object you once came to admire is a quiet kind of arrival. It is also a good description of how she moves through the world.
She is a designer, originally from Germany, who has spent close to twenty-five years living and working outside her home country. Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Austria, Mexico, and now a decade in New York. Along the way her medium shifted. She trained in product and furniture design, served as creative director for Woka Lamps Vienna, and somewhere in there food became the material she works with most. In 2022 she published the Silver Table Book. In 2025 she founded Objects In Residence with her partner, Desmond Miller.
We wanted to talk to Christiane because her life is built on a tension we think about often. She has moved constantly, yet she anchors herself with rituals, with people, with the same farmers market and the same restaurants. Movement and return are not opposites for her. They are two halves of the same practice.
What follows is less an interview than a portrait of a person paying close attention to how she lives.
The ritual that holds everything else
Ask Christiane how movement shows up in her day and the first thing she names is a table. Her morning routine happens at what she calls her silvertable, a fixture that has become, in her words, “a true essential over the years.” The table is also a ritual she carries online: silver table pictures and mirror selfies are something she says she cannot be without.
The rest of the day is motion. She bikes everywhere she can, even though New York traffic is, by her own account, scary and completely nuts. Lately she spends more than half of her week at her boyfriend’s place, which means a lot of carrying things back and forth. She rarely travels light. “I always carry at least two bags with me, or three or four,” she says, with the candor of someone who has stopped apologizing for it.
Her apartment matters for a specific reason: the openness, the light. She needs to feel connected to the outdoors even on the days she never steps outside. It is a designer’s instinct, the understanding that a room is not neutral, that it shapes the person inside it.
Learning to eat like a designer
The transition Christiane names as her biggest one was leaving for Rome in her very early twenties, while she was still studying at the Design Academy Eindhoven. For years she regretted it, or more precisely, she felt guilty about not finishing her studies. But Italy gave her what she needed most.
“Italy gave me a warm, welcoming culture, a way to eat that was new to me, celebrating simple life’s pleasures. That was my biggest shift back then. It has shaped how I see food to this day, and I’m grateful for it.”
That shift kept compounding. Dining out solo in New York during her early years here changed the way she eats, and she says it still does. The practice taught her to treat a meal as something composed rather than consumed. Her tables, she likes to say, invite you to eat with the palate of a designer.
It tracks with what she values in any object. Asked what makes her think something is well designed, her answer is short and exact: “Minimal form and use of material, purity, and elegance in brutalism.” The same eye she brings to a chair, she brings to a plate.
The cities that still get her
After ten years, New York is home, and yet certain avenues still make her feel excited when she rides along them. She is clear-eyed about the place. The city is not pretty, she says. It is edgy, incredibly dirty. But there is a spark to it she has found nowhere else.
Other cities hold a different charge. The streets of Rome and Paris carry a romance grounded in history, a magic of a different temperature. Christiane has lived inside that contrast long enough to stop ranking it. Each city does something specific to the way she thinks and works, and she lets it happen.
Underneath all of it is one principle she returns to without prompting. “It is all about relationships and treasuring them.” The cities matter because of the people in them, the restaurants where someone recognizes her after a few visits, the market she keeps going back to. Familiarity, for her, is not the enemy of discovery. It is where discovery becomes meaningful.
What comfort means at altitude
Christiane’s definition of comfort on the move is unglamorous and completely sincere. It is knowing she can eat well wherever she lands. She brings her own food on a flight, always. And it is knowing she is going somewhere exciting, or to see friends. Comfort, for her, is part logistics and part anticipation.
She is attentive to which senses sharpen in transit. A new place can light up all of them at once. But returning is different. “If it’s going back even after many years, definitely smell. It brings you right back.” It is the sense that collapses time, the one that carries a city back to you whole.
Staying awake in a familiar routine is something she manages through food. She could never eat the same thing twice in a row. She might keep a pattern, the things she loves, but she decides in the morning and it will almost always be different from the day before. Everything else she lets stay the same: the same streets by bike, the same cafés, the same faces that have started to know hers.
Language as a place you can live in
There is a comfort Christiane discovered slowly, and it surprised her. Language. She learned Italian and Spanish without ever sitting in a classroom, simply by living in the places where they are spoken. Even English, now her most-spoken language, more than German, holds nuances she says you only reach by living inside the culture.
As for what she keeps close, she is honest about the phone, which she uses to photograph everything, though she has trained herself out of documenting every single meal. And the bags, always the bags. There is one more thing she names, almost in passing, that says a great deal: she tries to be confident, but she is quite shy when she doesn’t know people. The rituals, perhaps, are partly how she meets that.
A destination called motion
Her next destination is not a place. “My destination is in motion,” she says. She will stay in New York, at least for a while, building Objects In Residence with Desmond. They have only just started. “I think we have lots of beautiful things coming our way, and we work hard for it.”
Her personal direction is simpler and harder: to stay open. She has noticed that openness influences everything, her work, her partnership, her friendships, and that when she holds it, opportunities seem to come up on their own. She also admits something many well-traveled people quietly feel. Despite all the countries, she doesn’t travel as much as she’d like, partly time, partly budget, and when she does she returns to the places where she knows people. Her wishlist of dream places stays long, and keeps evolving.
Closing reflection
Christiane’s life answers a question we keep circling at Sotiyo: what does it look like to move constantly and still feel grounded? Her answer isn’t a destination. It’s a set of small anchors that travel with her. A table. A bag, or four. A meal chosen fresh that morning. The smell of a city she’s returning to.
We design for that rhythm. The carrying back and forth, the bike across a familiar avenue, the food brought from home onto a plane. Comfort, for us, was never about adding more. It is about removing the friction between you and the life you’re actually trying to live, so the table you love can come with you.
Christiane has spent twenty-five years proving that a moving life and a rooted one can be the same life. You just have to choose what comes with you.
We want to invite you to discover more about her and her work on her wonderfully visual Instagram. Our advice: don't go in hungry. Or do — and you'll want to reach out to her right away.
Keep reading
If this stayed with you, you might enjoy our conversation with Victor, a photographer closing one New York chapter to open another, on packing lighter and noticing more.
Or subscribe to Roam Lines for new conversations about movement, design, and the lives people build between places.
