Lina, 24

I was born and raised in Marseille, in a sun-bleached apartment in Le Panier, the oldest neighborhood in the city, where my grandmother still lives three streets away from me. Le Panier is a maze of steep cobblestone streets, pastel shutters, tiny artist studios, and staircases covered in street art — and it shaped everything about me. As a kid I would sit on the steps outside our building with a sketchbook on my knees, drawing the lines of the buildings around me: the crooked rooflines, the iron balconies, the laundry hanging across the narrow streets like little flags. My parents ran a small épicerie, and on market days I would get up early with my mother to help carry crates of tomatoes, olives, and artichokes. I think that’s where my love of structure and color both come from — a city that is messy and beautiful at the same time.

I am now 24 and in my final year of architecture school here in Marseille. My days are long: studio critiques, model-building, endless tracing paper, and arguments about whether a facade should be bold or quiet. I love the mix of it all — the technical side, the math, the way a building has to actually stand up, and then the poetic side, the feeling a space gives you when you walk in. My dream is to work on the renovation of old buildings in Mediterranean cities, keeping their soul while making them livable for the future. I do a lot of my studying in cafés — there is one on the Place de Lenche where the owner knows my order by heart, a café crème and a pain aux raisins, and he lets me stay for hours with my laptop and my sketches. My friends tease me that I have measured half of Le Panier with my eyes.

When I am not in studio, I am usually outside. Marseille is a city that pulls you outdoors eleven months of the year. I swim at the Catalans beach in the morning before class when the water is calm and silver, and on weekends I take the bus to the Calanques — those white limestone cliffs dropping into turquoise water — to hike and draw. I keep a big sketchbook just for the Calanques: the pine trees, the stone cabins, the boats. Food is practically a religion here, and I take it seriously. Sunday mornings mean the market on the Cours Julien or the fish market at the Vieux-Port, where I buy dorade or rougets and cook for my friends that evening. My signature dish is a proper bouillabaisse, which my grandmother taught me, saffron and all. And of course, the apéritif: pastis with friends on a terrace as the sun goes down over the port, the sky turning that impossible pink-orange. You cannot live in Marseille and skip the apéro — it is sacred.

I am a warm person, a little stubborn, very loyal. I talk with my hands, I laugh loudly, and I cry at movies about cities. I collect postcards of buildings I have never visited and tapestries from flea markets. My apartment is small but full of plants, drawings, and a very opinionated cat named Zellige, after Moroccan tiles. I am looking for someone who is curious about the world — someone who will walk a city with me slowly, who notices the details: a beautiful doorway, the smell of bread from a boulangerie, the way light hits a wall at 6pm. I want a partner who loves good food and long conversations, who is comfortable with silence too, and who believes that a home is something you build together, not just four walls. If you can debate with me about whether Marseille or Lyon has the better food scene and then share a tarte tropézienne with me afterward, we will get along just fine.

One more thing you should know about me: I am a hopeless romantic about cities. I have a list of places I want to sketch in person — Lisbon, Naples, Barcelona — and I save a little money every month for a sketching trip. I also volunteer once a month with a local association that runs drawing workshops for kids in the northern districts of Marseille, and those kids draw with more freedom than any architecture student I know. My ideal evening is simple: cooking something from the market, a glass of Côtes de Provence rosé, music playing, Zellige the cat asleep on my sketches. I do not need grand gestures — I need someone who shows up, who is kind to waiters and curious about strangers, who will get happily lost with me in a new neighborhood and call it an adventure rather than a mistake. That is the life I am building, one drawing at a time, and I would love to share it with someone who sees the beauty in the details too.