How can design help you heal at home — when home no longer feels like a safe place? For architect and designer Anna Liubimova, that question sits at the heart of her brand SESTRÁ and her new collection presented at this year's 3daysofdesign. The project explores the home as a place where emotional life unfolds in all its messiness — where we break down, rebuild routines, seek comfort and, hopefully, begin to heal.

The collection grows out of Liubimova’s master’s thesis on domestic space in the context of domestic violence and how trauma reshapes relationships to home, safety and everyday objects. In that context, the home is no longer automatically a place of comfort, but can become a site of fear, hypervigilance and loss of control. With her new collection, Liubimova asks how design might help restore a sense of safety, agency and belonging.

Christine Bjerke, an architect and PhD fellow at the Royal Danish Academy, points to a crucial difference between having a place to stay and having a home:

“A home holds the notions of safety, privacy and a sense of agency of our surroundings. When that is broken, the question becomes what it takes to rebuild a home.”

That question guides Liubimova’s work at the intersection of socially driven design, responsible production and art. Trained as an architect and now based in Denmark, she brings together experience from architecture, spatial design and curatorial practice. With this collection, she moves closer to the scale of the body and the home, using objects to explore what care might look like in everyday life.

Healing is Never Clean

The project responds to a need for something different from the polished wellness culture that often shapes contemporary interiors. Spaces are increasingly styled around calm and control, but that language can feel detached from lived experience.

Liubimova found that healing is rarely neat or aspirational. In its earliest stages, it can look like exhaustion, grief or emotional overload:

“Nothing starts on a yoga mat. The real turning point happens at home, in unguarded moments when a person is at their lowest and begins to look for a way back.”

This insight shapes the project’s central question: how can domestic objects support emotional processing, belonging and survival? The collection asks how the home can shift from passive backdrop to active agent in shaping care.

Domestic Altars for Everyday Life

The collection is built around the idea of the domestic altar – not in a religious sense, but as a personal, intentional space. Across cultures, people create small areas for reflection, memory or grounding. Liubimova reinterprets these gestures for a contemporary home.

The objects are both functional and symbolic. A glass container for personal belongings combines visibility and privacy through layers of transparency and distortion. A contemplation stool pairs a sculptural ash wood base with a text–inscribed cushion, exploring what is shared and what remains hidden. A balancing table introduces slight instability, prompting bodily awareness, while a wooden plinth marks out space as intentional and distinct.

Together, the pieces suggest that objects are never neutral, but shape behaviour, perception and feeling.

Bjerke also points to the broader impact of surroundings:

“Our surroundings affect whether we feel that we are included and whether we can express ourselves in a space. We may have access to a space, but still not have the opportunity to be ourselves in it.”

This is why lived experience is central to Liubimova’s process, shaped through dialogue with crisis centre managers and survivors. The project’s phenomenological foundation understands objects not as static forms, but as conditions influencing how we experience space and ourselves.

Rebuilding Safety at Home

One of Liubimova’s key insights is that recovery often begins with small acts. Rebuilding routine can be a first step towards stability; spatially, this may mean defining a manageable area or giving meaningful belongings a place.

SESTRÁ responds with objects that support grounding rather than performance. They do not promise transformation or solve trauma, but help frame attention, presence and ownership. They make room for emotional complexity instead of hiding it.

The project shows that design can do more than decorate. It can hold difficult questions, challenge how we define comfort and suggest that care is embedded in the spaces and objects we live with.

An Open Conversation

At 3daysofdesign, Liubimova will present her collection alongside prototypes and process work. The installation is intended not as a finished statement, but as an invitation to dialogue about the rituals and objects that shape experiences of home.

That openness is central. SESTRÁ does not prescribe one way to heal, but makes emotional realities visible and acknowledges that the home can be both sanctuary and struggle. In that tension, Liubimova positions design as a quiet framework for care.