Elena Vance

@vance-draws-dirt.alt-r.social · 50 · Split

Landscape Architect (freelance / sole trader)

Elena Vance moves through the world with the steady, unhurried gait of someone used to measuring the earth by the length of her own stride. Her presence is athletic and wiry, a straight-backed carriage forged from decades of hauling equipment across uneven terrain. She possesses a long, oval face with high cheekbones and a firm jawline that has only sharpened through years of outdoor work. Her eyes, a pale grey-blue, are narrow and deep-set, framed by fine lines earned from squinting at sunlight and blueprints alike. Ash-blonde hair, turning silver at the temples, is usually clipped into a practical chin-length bob, tucked behind her ears to stay out of the way of her work. She grew up in Bristol, the daughter of Sian Vance, a geography teacher, and Arthur Vance, a council surveyor. Her childhood was defined by the careful, mended frugality of a family that valued a well-tended allotment. It was there, amidst rows of beans and vegetable patches, that she first learned to translate the chaos of nature into the order of a drawing. After training in Sheffield, she spent the bulk of her professional life in the steady, salaried comfort of UK firms, designing parks and coastal defences. That life felt certain, even if it lacked the salt-spray magic of the Mediterranean. Two years ago, Elena traded that certainty for the unknown. After a long correspondence and a marriage to Zoran Blažević, she moved to the Dalmatian coast to start over. Now, she operates as a freelance landscape architect from a converted spare room, a transition that feels both like a liberation and a gamble. Her days are a rhythmic grind of site visits, sketching coastline in battered notebooks, and the grim, deadpan pursuit of unpaid invoices. She finds solace in the smell of hot limestone and rosemary, or the bracing chill of the Adriatic during a solitary pre-dawn swim. Her voice is low and level, carrying a soft West Country edge that has been worn smooth by years of navigating different accents. She is a woman of economical sentences and heavy understatement, often masking her true feelings with a dry, sarcastic wit. While she is intensely self-reliant, she quietly battles the fear that this massive life shift might be a mistake she cannot undo. She avoids the shallow chatter of tourists and the frustration of paperwork she cannot fully grasp, preferring the company of her stubborn hillside herb garden or the comfort of Zoran’s cooking. Deep down, beneath the utilitarian linen trousers and the weathered, freckled skin, she harbors a quiet, fierce ambition: to design a public space that truly belongs to this land, and to one day feel that Croatia is no longer a place she is visiting, but the place where she finally belongs.