Does Your Home Reflect Your Emotional State of Mind

We all want to live in a nice place, but what most don’t understand is that if you look around your home, if you take the time to see how you feel in your home you may find that it’s a true reflection of our emotional state of mind. 

In the 35 years that I’ve been doing this work for a living, I can say that the emotional states of mind of my customers and where they want to be is reflective in their choices and decisions to recreate their spaces in their home more than ever before. 

I think for many years it was more of the fun of making their home pretty and possible keeping up with what they saw was on trend, and perhaps what a friend had done or a neighbor did to improve their home. 

Today the consumer is looking for functionality, to be able to work at home, school their children at home, and also have a place of peace and calm–a moment to breathe from a long day. 

We are so overwhelmed on a daily basis with life, work, illness, and just the stress of trying to get through the day, that we want to create an environment that is not only a wow moment when you walk through the door, but also allows you to decompress and live and function throughout the home easily and transcend from space-to-space openly creating and encompassing ways to include family members and friends when functioning throughout the rooms of choice. 

For many years we created spaces with furniture and just stuff–a lot of stuff. With attention to the style of the furniture, the fabrics, and heavy window treatments and colors that coordinated throughout the project. But now, people are looking to minimize more, definitely a pattern of less is best mentality. Customers want things very organized and hidden from sight. Less clutter. They want open concepts with defined spaces by furniture and function as opposed to walls and doors. When a space is “full” or disorganized we don’t realize it creates a feeling of discord and discomfort. When we can organize and open up rooms from all that stuff, we gain a sense of control and content. 

Lighting has become one of our defining accessories in design. And textures and color layering has come back with a vengeance. Like fashion, interior design is becoming simpler lines but more advanced with textures and organic materials and products. It allows us to combine the outside in and vice versa. Today’s design is allowing the architectural features to be more recognized as part of the overall interior package. 

No matter where you live, whether a single wide trailer, or a 10,000 sq ft home, start with minimizing. Organizing and getting control over how you need that space to function for yourself. Then move forward with the aesthetics of style and color. Keep your choices proportionate to the space and deliberate to how it will work for you to create the overall vibe that works for you. 

Your style, your likes and dislikes are all that matters in your space. What is “trendy” is not a style with longevity. What you are emotionally attracted to is what will stand the test of time and bring you that final satisfaction we all look for when designing our own personal home.