- Slow Down and Catch your Breath by Having a Neat and Clean Space – If you’ve ever been to a spa, you won’t find any clutter. Most wellness centres have minimally furnished rooms. Any equipment that you find is neatly hidden away in some closet after they’re used. As a result, you get into a state of relaxation a lot faster and easier with nothing to distract your senses. If you find yourself not being able to relax at home, it may be that your space isn’t as efficiently decorated like a wellness spa or as clean and neatly arranged like a nice hotel room. You may also have hoarding or mess-creating habits that prevent your home from being a sanctuary that allows you to slow down and catch your breath from your busy life. Homes that are designed to make people relax tend to have furniture that has been thoughtfully selected to fit a theme, colours to help you feel at ease, and a certain arrangement that makes it easiser to relax. There should plants in empty corners, atop various table surfaces, and hanging from the ceiling to improve air quality by absorbing toxic off gases emitted by various household objects around the house. Having plants around can help in lower our level of tension by 40 % according to wellness & meditation expert Emma Mills. Adding various elements to make your space feel like a unified whole that is also customized to fit your unique taste and lifestyle also helps to release stress. Everything that you see and touch has to be functional, comfortable and pleasing to the eye. Call an experienced interior design professional to help you create a functional, beautiful, and easy-to-maintain space that allows you to slow down and feel instantly at ease the minute you enter it.
2. Makes it Easier to Achieve Peace of Mind – What helps to make your home visually appealing, but conducive to achieving peace of mind? Think about those times that you wanted to escape your normal life and go someplace different in order to relax. What elements did you find made it easier to calm down? Most places that people go to that help them feel like they’re on holiday from their daily humdrum lives are usually beautifully decorated, beautifully lighted, freshly scented, and comfortably furnished to help you forget all your cares and worries. Now let’s break that down for a minute and start with comfort. Are your mattress and sofa easy on your backside? These are the two pieces of furniture that we all use a lot and if they’re not that comfortable we won’t be able to sleep as soundly or feel as comfortable or enjoyable using. Do you have a nice bathtub or shower where you can spend some time in and help slow down your “on-all-the-time” mind? Do you still have things you’ve owned many years that you don’t like as much and makes you wince each time you look at them being that they’re old and tired? Time to rethink your furniture and invest and things that make you feel good about yourself each time you see them. What kind of lighting do you have in your home? Does it make you look beautiful, or tired and haggard? Or does it make you feel sad about your own life like the harsh ceiling mounted white fluorescent lights did to me in the house where I grew up? Take note that restaurants and hotels are lighted to make occupants look their best so you may want to take a cue from that and get some professional advice with regards to lighting. Having trouble staying organized and neat? The best way to control that is by having enough storage to keep your stuff out of sight. Talk to a designer today to see how to incorporate custom or off-the-shelf storage solutions either through shelves or furniture that offer storage feature to help you control clutter accumulation and make it easier to achieve peace of mind when you’re at home.
3. Makes it Easier to Disconnect from Work (and Tech) + Reconnect with our Deepest Desires – Having a very clean and uncluttered space with your various pieces of tech hidden away makes it easier for you to rediscover a precious resource that seems to be slipping away our grasp the more we engage with it, which is time. When you make your TV a bit harder to access (like putting it in a media cabinet with closed doors or inside another bedroom where you don’t sleep), you tend to use it a little less often as there’s a bit of effort involved to get to it. You’ll find that if you disconnect from your phone, your laptop or your TV and do a little less surfing and bit more of nothing, your mind tends to slow down much easier. Think about it this way, bachelor’s apartments are set up for entertainment where a flat screen TV tends to dominate which makes sense as life after work tends to revolve around watching serials or playing videogames of some kind. While that may still happen when you’re partnered up with someone, there’s greater emphasis when you’ve coupled up to have a nicer dining area, a quieter living room where you can do various things other than just stare at a computer screen and more carefully designed bedrooms that are cozy and relaxing. Once you start having a family, the whole house has to be functional and comfortable and not simply centered on entertainment, which may still play an important role but it’s not the sole purpose of the home. When you make design a home that allows you to easily unplug from work/tech so you can do other interesting things like talk to your family members, invite people over so you can enjoy one other’s company, or mediate or exercise in some underutilized corner. When the design of your home allows you to do nothing and simply enjoy being in the moment, you will feel more creative, more centred and more at peace yourself and the world. Talk to a designer on how you can create a home that makes it possible to be more connected to your goals and your need to take better care of yourself.
4, Makes it Easier to Focus on the Things that Matter – Do you know that in some cultures (like the French and Italian ones), eating is a big part of their lives? When we rush through our meals, the quality of interactions with other people around us gets taken away. One reason people gain weight easily quickly is that they’re at their desk the whole day and don’t use up their entire lunch break to get up and walk (or even run). Instead, they’re rushing through all their meals and not looking after their health as much. What do you think happens when you don’t have a proper dining table at home? You tend to take meals quickly and then do something else that takes up your time, like do more sitting around the house to do play some videogames or watch a show from your streaming service. So you’re sitting on your butt the whole day and then back on your butt in the evening. But when you have a properly dining room with nicely picked cutlery and plates, you tend to slow down and enjoy the process of eating because… why let such lovely dinnerware go to waste? And when you have a nicely designed kitchen, you may feel more encouraged to actually prepare a meal from scratch rather than order some restaurant takeout. Having a nice home makes you more confident to invite people over to share a meal so that you can all get together and catch up on each other’s lives. When you’ve designed your house to look like a nice hotel room (with a HEPA filter and/or ionizer), it’s a lot easier to sleep. And when the dining room has been set up to resemble an attractive or cozy restaurant or café that you love to spend time in, family members and friends will tend to want to hang out at your place and spend more time together with you.
5. Reconnect with Yourself – One of the most popular books these days is a book about decluttering and trying to live with the least amount of stuff as possible. It’s actually pretty sound advice, except some people have found it to be extreme. One thing you will discover though if you ever get into serious ‘cleansing’ mode is that letting go of unnecessary belonging can make you feel lighter and freer. I like to tell my clients that they don’t really have to own a lot of things. All they need is a few good things that they are built to last that can be handed down to the next generation. I’ve got a sofa from HBF for example that I’ve owned for more than 20 years and looks like I just bought it last week. It’s made really well and I look after it very carefully. I also own a mirrored chest of drawers that’s very functional and pretty. That’s a keeper too. I’ve also got four reproduction Le Corbusier LC7 swivel armchairs that I will keep forever as they’re one of a kind and more like pieces of art deco sculpture than furniture. No matter what you buy, make sure that it lasts for a long time, whether you obtained it cheaply or expensively make sure that each piece resonates with you visually and functionally. Get the help of a professional to help you choose things that will endure, if need be. That way, you can limit the amount of things that end up being discarded later on because you may have bought it on impulse and then regretted the purchase later because it wasn’t really right for you (or your space). And when you create a plan for managing your stuff before it accumulates into unmanageable piles, the more calm and relaxed you’ll feel whenever you enter your home as there’s no clutter to distract your mind or cause any anxiety. And if you’ve distilled your space so that you own only the things that you need or truly want, it will be easier carve out a corner of your home to reflect, pray, or meditate. It’s important that your personal space not only functions as a place to eat or sleep, it should also be a place where you can connect to your dreams on a daily basis and be able to create new possibilities for life and for other people as well.
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