Here’s What a Life-Changing Home Actually Looks Like

What spirit or idea do you aim to capture in your videos?

KD: Our goal really is to get people talking about their home as a way to get them to talk about their philosophy of life. By crafting a home, they’re crafting their life. Some people are really in touch with that. They’re really tied in with how they want to be as a person. It could mean living in something really small, so that they’re really in touch with the nature around them. A lot of people have told us “the bigger the house, the farther away you get from your windows and from your views.” Other people talk about how a really cluttered house keeps them from thinking and processing what they want to process. So the home is really an excuse to talk about some bigger ideas.

NB: We try to do this without using big words, trying to make people respond to the discourse. We try not to be pretentious. If people want to talk about big philosophical ideas, we let them, but we try not to steer them there.

What were you doing before you started the channel?

KD: We both come from journalism. I had been working at a television station in New York. Nico had been doing a lot of magazine work in Barcelona. I initially went to Spain to do some work for the Sundance Channel. I had an interview with Javier Bardem for a movie that the channel was releasing. I really just loved Spain and decided to stay and learn Spanish. Nico and I met doing a language exchange at the very beginning of 2004 and sort of just went back and forth between New York and Barcelona for awhile.

When I moved permanently to Barcelona, you can’t really just do television in another language. I would do some freelance work for New York-based companies, and be mailing 30 gigabyte hard drives across the ocean or go back for a week do to a wedding show, but it wasn’t optimal. It was Nico’s idea to start Faircompanies.

NB: YouTube had just started, but it wasn’t really a big thing. One of our local TV channels was making these mini documentaries, like day in the life stuff. I remember Kirsten saying she’d like to do this kind of stuff. But it wasn’t what the producers she was working with were interested in. So we decided to just start making videos on our own website.

KD: Faircompanies is a website about environmental sustainability, inspired by the Whole Earth Catalog, but also the DIY perspective that everyone has the ability to make or do anything. At the beginning, the stories were like “Worm Composting on Our Apartment Terrace.” “Green Hair Products.” We were trying things. Whatever we’d find or stumble across. We started posting to YouTube mainly because it was a cheap place to host videos. Eventually, it made us viral, but that was never the goal.

Source: https://www.fieldmag.com/articles/kirsten-dirksen-nicolas-boullosa-interview-life-changing-homes