Field ethnography is a method of gathering information for social research. It is unavoidably partial as researchers and their participants shape some account of the world together. There are some ethical questions about who controls the process of selection, and whose voices or what topics are brought forward. This essay focuses on the use of one fieldwork ethnography method, the object-led interview, which affords the researcher a mode of inquiry that is generative and creates multiple connections. The purpose of the research is to understand and engage how ordinary, peri-urban-rural areas settle. What is broken or built, when, and by whom in processes of settling-in and unsettling? The research aims to understand the breaking apart or break down of property and ecology in peri-urban-rural areas as part of a lived ecology that can shape emergent cultural practice. This is of relevance to a designer in such transformations.