By Paul Miller

Interior Designer

Read Time: 6 Minutes

At MakeNest, we talk a lot about the joyful, honest, and fearless home. This is because we want to support clients in their journey to make a great home experience for themselves. Not a copy of something from a magazine. Not a checklist of trends. A truly personal retreat that matches their aspirations, honors their past and their interests, and provides comfort and pleasure on the best and worst of days.

Good design can help you to enjoy your house on an emotional level that brings happiness, calm, and confidence. Here are a few healthy thought exercises to set yourself up for a home that is joyful, honest, and fearless.

Set Joy Boundaries

Virginia Woolf famously said, “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” One can imagine how many interrupted creative sessions led her to that observation. It is important to design with intention in mind. If you intend to relax in a space, make it relaxing. If you intend to get busy, design it for efficient busy work.

Sometimes a home insists upon rooms that multifunction, but do a gut check before committing to sacrifice a meaningful personal space to the greater good. If sorting out finances or answering emails stresses you out, the last thing you’ll want is to have that function happening in the same room where you planned on doing yoga.

Think about which functions bring you joy and which ones cause stress and try to keep a line between those. This thought exercise can bring a lot of clarity and help determine how you plan your house design.

Get Organized

A lot of us want to curl into a ball when we hear the advice to get organized. It can seem like a lot of work and, if you’re naturally adaptive, it’s easy to think you always make things work out. Still, regardless of whether you’re a t-crossing, i-dotting perfectionist or a go-with-the-flow bohemian, a certain degree of upfront organization makes life much easier in the long run.

The best approach is to observe yourself as you go through your day and note the times when you had to go out of your way to keep a task on track. For naturally adaptive youngest kids like myself, its easy to put up with a lot of minor inefficiencies. We might not realize that after a year of getting up from our desk and crossing the room to staple documents, we need to just find room in the desk for the stapler.

Be critical of acquiring new things to help you get organized. Sometimes it really does take a carload of plastic tubs from Costco to get sorted, but it may be just as likely that scrapping some things and thinking differently about your cupboard spaces will pull the loose ends of your life together.

Charm VS. Clutter

In the design for my husband’s hair salon, Ed’s Heads, we wanted to highlight his maximalist style and collection of assorted nostalgia. We also wanted to be honest with ourselves about the work it would take to keep the collection clean and visually focused. That lead to our design of a large custom shadowbox, which protects an array of vintage toys and memorabilia from dust and the hazards of regular cleaning. The result was focused chaos that delights his patrons and is easy to live with.

If you are not the kind of person who likes to display a lot of things and prefers simplicity, make sure this is considered when buying, building, or renovating your home. It’s easy to be charmed by custom builtins, but if you do not have a large collection or plan to build one, a large wall of shelves can prove to be another stress factor, crying out for attention and accessories you either don’t possess or will not value.

For the craver of simplicity, beautifully crafted cupboards with doors are far more functional, allowing for brutally efficient storage that requires less thought and maintenance. Again, your design should honor how you want to live and not what looks sharp in an Instagram photo.

Let In The Sunshine

It may seem obvious, but one surefire way to make a home more joyful is to make sure it has plenty of natural light. Whether planned in architectural drafts or taken into consideration in design choices for an existing home, connecting a room to natural light can bring us more energy and joy.

Consider the rooms where energy is most important when planning a new home build and research the site to figure out how to orient the house to capture and control natural light.

For the room that has limited natural sunlight due to its orientation, there are a number of ways to make the space feel sunnier. Skylights and solar light tube systems can capture light from the roof and communicate it into the space for a flood of actual sunlight. Light, clear wall colors in a pearl finish and shiny floor surfaces can reflect and magnify light.

Not everyone likes a bright, sunny room, but putting mood and sensibility aside, the vitamin D that we take in from the sun bolsters our health and happiness. And depending on the use of the room, the presence of clear, direct sunlight can make your tasks much more enjoyable.

Make Room For Your Passions

Your home should reflect the things you care about. If you always meant to take up painting, consider how to carve out a creative space for doing just that. Maybe you like to read in absolute silence; plan to insulate the walls of an out of the way spot to assure quiet alone time. Whether it is a whole room or a play station, it is important to make not just room, but thoughtfully designed room for pursuing your interests.

Still, it doesn’t hurt to be critical about your needs. Part of any good design thinking is being honest with yourself about your own habits. You may have planned an office in your last house, but still found yourself perched at the kitchen island to use your computer. On the next iteration of your home, you might just get real and decide against the office. Design should be personal and fit the patterns and preferences that bring you contentment. It’s just as important to know what you don’t need as it is to know what you do.

Honor Your Past With What Brings Your Joy

Many times I have watched a client struggle with whether or not to keep a family heirloom. My devotion to eclectic design is founded in part upon the idea that design should not subscribe to only current trends; nor should it push our history aside or steer us into narrow lanes.

If you really don’t like Grandma’s rocker, let it find a new home with someone who will. To give it up is not to forget your loved ones. However, when you are attached to things from your past, it is perfectly reasonable to hold onto them and make room for them in your design. They may remain as they came to you or be modified in purpose or finish to match your tastes.

A practical example: many clients feel uncertain about if and how to display family photos, particularly when they have a lot and worry that making room for them is a pandora’s box. It is true that too many family photos can look cluttered, but there are ways to manage this. One is to look at those snapshots from the beach and ask yourself if they really are good pictures of your loved ones. They may be just as happy in an album or even digitized and stored online. Another tactic is to find a good wall, preferably in a part of the house designated for close friends such as a family room or back hall, to display a wide assortment of cherished photos in one place.

Make Your Home About You

At the end of the day, the most joyful spaces are the ones that are honest and fearless. Always put your own truths ahead of trends and be willing to put in a little advance thought to ensure easier living ahead. Creating a home for happiness means sorting the patterns of your life and getting organized. And it means making room for passions, history, and sunshine.

If planning to bring more joy into your home gets you excited - or even overwhelms you a little, wondering how to get started - reach out to an interior designer. You can start the conversation with us here.