For a long time I thought building something started with an idea.

Now I don't think so.

Sometimes it starts much earlier. It starts while you're living. While you're figuring things out. While you're being a mom, a daughter, a friend, a woman. While you make mistakes, change your mind, make plans that never happen and learn, sometimes the easy way and sometimes not, that life rarely looks the way you imagined it.

These last few years have changed me a lot.

My daughters grew up. And even though I obviously knew it was coming, nobody told me how strange it feels when it actually happens.

Being a mom has probably been the most important job of my life. For years, most of my days were built around them: where they were, what they needed, what was worrying them, how to help them, how to protect them.

And then a moment comes when love starts asking something completely different of you.

Letting go.

Letting them make their own lives. Make mistakes. Choose. Leave.

And learning, yourself, to stay a little more with you.

I'm not going to romanticize it. There have been beautiful moments and very hard ones. I've been afraid. I've doubted myself so much. I've felt that very particular guilt we moms know so well, the kind that shows up even when you know, rationally, that you're doing the best you can.

I've also had to accept that some chapters end even when you're not quite ready to say goodbye to them.

But in the middle of all that movement, something happened that I can see very clearly now:

I found parts of myself again that I had put away for a while.

I've always been fascinated by beautiful things.

And when I say beautiful, I don't just mean expensive or perfect.

It can be an incredible table at a restaurant nobody knows about. A woman who does something extraordinarily well. A tiny hotel I want to go back to. A book. A recipe. The perfect white shirt. A conversation. A house. A photograph. A cream that actually works. A city. An idea.

I'm that person who, the moment she discovers something good, immediately thinks: I have to send this to someone.

I think I've been doing that my whole life.

My friends ask me where to buy something, where to eat, what to pack for a trip, what to give, what to try. I ask around, I research, I save screenshots, I make lists, I discover people and places.

And one day I realized that maybe all of that, which seemed like just part of my personality, could also become something.

At the same time, I needed to create.

I needed to put my head and my energy into something that excited me. Something that was mine, but that I could also share.

I didn't want to invent a new Cordelia.

At this point in my life, frankly, that doesn't interest me.

I wanted to go back to the one who had always been there.

The curious one. The one who asks. The one who searches. The one who cooks. The one who travels. The one who watches. The one who finds beauty in unexpected places. The one who gets excited discovering someone who does their work with incredible passion.

And that's where The Ėditure started to appear.

Not as a perfect answer to everything I was going through.

More like a consequence.

All the energy I had spent for so long caring, solving, worrying, anticipating and trying to keep everything under control, I started putting into creating too.

And it was amazing to discover how much I still wanted to.

Wanted to start.

Wanted to learn something new.

Wanted to work with talented people.

Wanted to build a community.

Wanted to be surprised again.

There's something very powerful about discovering that once you've lived enough to know yourself better.

Because starting at this age is different.

You already know things can go wrong.

You already know people change.

You already know kids grow up.

You already know some plans fall apart and that, even so, life goes on.

But you also know something you maybe didn't know when you were younger:

you go on, too.

And you can choose again.

You can fall in love with an idea again.

You can change.

You can build something new without having to tear down everything that came before.

You can be a mom and still be a woman.

You can care deeply for others without disappearing yourself.

And you can discover that a stage that seemed to be taking something away from you may also have been making room for you.

The Ėditure was born in that room.

And The Magazine exists because I don't want this place to be only about things we love.

I want it to be about the people behind them.

I want to meet women and men who do something extraordinarily well. People with interesting stories, with craft, with sensitivity, with failures, with obsessions, with ideas.

I want this to be a place where we can talk about design and motherhood. About food and fear. About travel, beauty, books, business, relationships, homes, creativity and starting over.

About beautiful things.

And also about important things.

Because after these years I've understood that an interesting life isn't a perfect life.

It's a life that still makes you curious.

Today my daughters are starting to build their own lives.

And I'm learning to build this new part of mine.

I don't know exactly what it's going to look like.

And for the first time in a long time, I don't need to know everything.

I just know I really, really want to find out.

And if you're reading this, it means so much to me that you're coming along.

Welcome to The Magazine.

Welcome to The Ėditure.

— Corde