A chart is not a picture of a thing; it is a promise about it. To draw a chart is to say: my attention reaches this far, and no further. This one reaches from the Three Sisters in the Rätikon range, down through the house on Herrengasse, and out to a hundred-year-old oak on a Vorarlberg hillside. What falls outside this circle belongs to other houses.
At the centre: Herrengasse 30, nine-hundred and ninety metres below Vaduz Castle, in a Liechtensteiner town house with green shutters and a hipped roof. This is where I sit on the days I am not in Singapore. The postal address reads c/o Equanimity AG; the door is wooden, with a small enamel plate bearing the number 30.
To the north — The Rätikon. The Three Sisters, visible from the office on the far side of the valley. They are the morning reminder that a person who looks at a long line for long enough eventually becomes one.
To the north-east — The Apprenticeship. The paint shop of the Liebherr works in Nenzing, where between 2005 and 2008 I learned that a surface must be primed twice before it is truly primed. A lesson that holds equally well in a steel hall and in an Excel workbook.
To the south-east — The Logbook. The bound notebook in which I keep dated, anonymised observations from work. About a third of it appears here, in chapter two. The other two-thirds remain where they belong: between me and the patriarchs.
To the south — Office Hours. A wing-back chair, a glass of water, an empty notepad. The few hours each week in which I take calls, and the small number of meetings in which I sit at your kitchen table.
To the south-west — The Harbour. Lake Constance, eastward of Bregenz. A small wooden boat moored to a stone quay. It is not mine, but I visit it often enough to count the bollard at the edge of the pier as an acquaintance.
To the north-west — The Stone. An oak tree on a Vorarlberg meadow, with a low dry-stone wall in the foreground. It is a hundred years old, perhaps two hundred. Whoever tends it does not think in quarters. That is the only form of wealth management I am willing to offer.
A seventh point, not marked on the plate — Arosa
To the north-east of the chart, where it ends, the Schanfigg valley begins. At 1,800 metres lies Arosa — the small, unhurried alpine town that German-speaking families choose when they want neither St-Moritz nor Davos. In winter, for the safety. In summer, because by then almost no one is left there. You may know the Tschuggen Grand or the Kulm. You may spend a week or two there each year. If so, I will travel to you — by rail from St. Margrethen via Chur, two and a half hours from Vaduz. One conversation in the chair of a hotel library is worth three telephone calls.
And in Arosa — this should not go unsaid — there is Anna Jelen. Anna is, as a rule, not available to be spoken with. She is expensive and hard to reach, and that is as it should be. But once you have sat with her in a room for an hour, the world will be a different one — not because the world has changed, but because Anna is one of the few people who can quiet a person. We know her. When it fits, we make the introduction — a fuller introduction sits in the harbour.
A second berth — Singapore
If this chart pleases you, turn the page — on the next you will find how to reach this house.