Don’t know where to start with your renovation or new build?

We often focus on what our home will look like when we plan our renovation or new build. However, focussing on how your home feels – and how you feel in your home – may be a better place to start.

Generally speaking, most of us come back to our house at the end of our day.

We put our key in the door, unlock it, walk inside and put down our things.

Our house is a collection of rooms and spaces, filled with furniture and our belongings. It keeps the weather off our heads, keeps our possessions dry, and gives us somewhere to secure them when we’re not around.

At its most basic level, it’s a container, and an address. Somewhere we can cook, eat, wee and poo, keep our stuff and receive our mail (not necessarily in that order!).

Your home, on the other hand, is a very different thing.

Your home is a feeling. It can be embodied in a location, a space, a building, with certain people and belongings.

It is wrapped up in emotions, symbols, psychology, your sense of self, status and identify, and your dreams and aspirations.

It is much more significant and meaningful, and your ability to have a great one is much more influential on your life.

So how do you make your house a home? YOUR home?

When you think of “home”, my experience is that you recall things, times and places that create certain feelings.

These recollections may have physical placement in a house – houses you know and have lived in, or even dreamed of. However the difference is that they will generally be associated with events or experiences. It may be as simple as sitting in a beautiful light in the afternoon looking out the window at something that made you happy, or the same table you sat at each and every evening to eat with your family and share the happenings of your day.

Generally, when you think about all the places you REALLY consider ‘home’ (not just the buildings you grew up in – but where you FEEL home), they have a common thread. They are the places you feel loved, happy, safe, the best and truest version of yourself and where anything is possible.

Houses are the built objects that act as the stage to our lives.

How we occupy them – live in them – make them our homes – that is related to how the houses make us feel. This is more arbitrary, sometimes difficult to nail down, but I firmly believe it is facilitated by design.

For me, design isn’t about aesthetics, or wow-factor. Design is about how your home feels, and how you feel in your home.

And getting that to work – making that happen – I believe everyone can (and deserves to) access that – regardless of budget or location.

How you feel in your home is facilitated by the way the space is designed … the light, the volume, the proportions of each room, how it enables furniture to be arranged, how people can move through it, how it displays and hides your belongings, and how it ‘contains’ you and your life in a way that enables you and your life to grow, to be better.  And how it launches you into the world each day.

Well-designed environments make life better.

What does “well-designed” mean? Ultimately, it’s design that improves the quality of your life.  It’s design that is simple, beautiful, efficient, useful, functional and flexible.  And when it works – it makes life like this too.

So, what does ‘home’ mean to you? What hopes and dreams do you have for your home – or perhaps the better question is – how do you want to feel in your home?

Write it down, because it is important.

What if the house you wake up in every day could be where you feel the safest, the most love, the happiest … the best and truest version of yourself?

That could be your heaven and your haven? YOUR home?

Where you could feel anything is possible?

How would that change your world?