4 Ways to Make Your Home FEEL Better

Think about how your home feels? Warm? Inviting? Does it feel like a warm hug when you walk in after a long day? OR does it feel chaotic and a little anxiety provoking? Thinking about how my home FEELS to me is really important. That’s my reason for being an interior designer altogether! If you signed up for our email list, you got a sequence of emails that talk a little bit about my journey becoming an interior designer. We used to live in a 200-year-old farmhouse here in Monson, Massachusetts while our current house was being built. And… let me just say it wasn’t as comforting as the whole farm house trend makes you think.

After living in a place that never felt completely like home, it’s important to me that my home feels comforting, safe and is a HAPPY place to be. SO I often think about the people that are stuck in a home that doesn’t make them feel good. AND that makes me sad! So when I have a new client, one of the questions that we ask on the questionnaire is how do YOU want YOUR home to FEEL.

People often think interior design is just about how things look and the surface level of it, but really, to me, it’s not just about how it looks. Yes, of course, we want it to look beautiful! BUT how do you want it to feel!! Right?! Do you want it to feel warm and cozy? Do you want it to feel clean and sleek? Do you want it to feel traditional or modern? SO… how does your home feel right now? Especially after having spent the majority of the last year stuck in your home.

I hear a lot of times from clients that their home just doesn’t feel right BUT they don’t know WHY. So here are 4 things to consider when you’re home just doesn’t feel right to you!

1. SCALE
This is something that I see A LOT. And it’s a reason for a room to not just feel right. What is the scale of the furniture to the room? If you have a large room and you have a lot of little furniture, then it doesn’t feel right! If you have a small room and a lot of big furniture, then that doesn’t feel right either! What about the scale of your furniture to each other? What if you have a giant oversized sofa and you have a little, dainty end table? It doesn’t feel right! OR if you have a big chunky coffee table and a delicate modern sofa, that doesn’t feel right either.

What about your artwork? If you have a really big room and you have tiny little pieces of art you need to either go bigger with your art or group those small pieces together because your artwork needs to be in scale with your room and with your furniture. For instance, over your bed or sofa your artwork should take up 2/3 of that space. So if you have a 90 inch sofa then you want a 60 inch wide art piece or two 30 inch art pieces to take up 2/3 of that space. That way your artwork doesn’t look like a little postage stamp above your sofa or above your bed.

2. COLOR
The other thing is color! A lot of people, especially here in New England, have a warm room with earth tones and dark sofas from previous decades and now they want to paint the walls gray. YOU CAN’T DO THAT! You can’t just paint the walls gray and have everything else in your room be warm browns or beige. The easiest way to pick a paint color is to pick the paint color out of something that’s already in the room. SO if you have a throw pillow or something that you love, you can pull a color from that! Don’t just pick a random paint color like gray and paint your walls that color.

3. SEATING ARRANGEMENT
When you have a seating arrangement in a family room it should be so that people can easily talk to each other. So, if you have furniture that’s all “under arrest” or up against the wall, it’s difficult, in a larger room, for people to talk to each other. Right? So pull your furniture away from the walls and have conversation areas so that people can easily chat with each other when they’re seated. It will make it feel warmer and it’ll make it function better because you can actually have a conversation with the people that are in the room with you!

4. HOME COHESION
Another thing that sometimes makes a home not feel right is that the rooms don’t relate to one another. So when it comes to bedrooms, those can be different from the rest of your house right? BUT if you have a family room and a kitchen and a dining room, they should have some flow and commonalities.

Maybe you have navy blue as the accent color in your dining room and in your living room. That pulls them together! I’m not saying they have to match. I’m just saying they should coordinate and blend so it’s not like you’re in a purple living room and all of a sudden you go to a green dining room and then a grey kitchen. They need to relate to each other somehow.

SO… take a look around! How does your house make you feel right now? Sometimes our environments really make us feel overwhelmed or anxious (check out our blog on how your home can decrease anxiety, HERE). And we just don’t take the time to notice. Trust me, once you fix those details, your home will feel so much BETTER! That is, after all, why my business is called “Details”. AND if you’re still struggling, book a FREE 15 minute phone call HERE so we can figure it out together!

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