Bedroom Makeover
Is your home doing its job when it comes to your romantic life?
How to make space for love in the home
The design of your home can help keep your love life alive or even bring new love into your life. It can also keep love away. Design that sparks love isn’t particularly magical or “woo-woo.” It’s not about love potions or painting your walls red. It’s simply about becoming aware of the messages your home is sending out about how open you are to sharing your space and your life with another person.
Your home is also a place of hope and healing when relationships end and it’s time for a new beginning. Love is as skittish as a bird, and like it or not, it never promises to stay. So whatever situation you’re in, remember it’s just one chapter of your life. Use the information here to turn the end of every story into the beginning of a new one.
Make room for love
Once you’ve created a space that reflects your preferences, desires, and dreams, it’s time to make emotional and physical space for another person. Don’t worry, that doesn’t mean you have to destroy all the work you just did to make the place your own. You’re not decorating for someone else; you are simply creating a little room in your home (and heart) for another person.
Send the right message
The home is like a beacon that signals to the world whether you are ready to give and receive love. This is true both when you are looking for love and when you are in an established relationship. To illustrate this, picture the following rooms, which send exactly the opposite message (I’ve encountered all of these over the years as an interior designer).
Rooms that appear to reject romance:
A woman’s bedroom stuffed with toy animals and a pink satin comforter on the bed.
A single guy’s bedroom with a mattress on the floor and an old sheet tacked over the window.
· A bedroom with a double bed pushed up against the wall, with every closet and dresser overflowing with one person’s clothes. A well-to-do bachelor’s living room dressed to the nines in high-quality furnishings, all in heavy black leather and sharpedged stainless steel, focused on a massive flat-screen TV. A socialite’s living room painted pale peach, furnished with a gorgeous white silk sofa, cream wool rug and sheer linen curtains. A couple’s bedroom so full of kid’s toys, paperwork, and laundry, you’d never know the room was meant for rest and sensuality.
Each of these clients insisted they were open to love and ready to share their time and space with another person, but their rooms all flashed a big “No Vacancy” sign. A mattress on the floor and a sheet over a window imply that the person living in that room isn’t ready to commit to anything that requires thought or investment. A bed pushed against the wall literally blocks the way for another person to crawl into bed, and an overstuffed closet signals “no more room.”
If you’re preparing for a new partnership, make a fresh start in the bedroom! Pictures of old girlfriends, gifts from old boyfriends, and even mementos of childhood may need to be tucked away if you really are ready to begin an emotionally healthy relationship. Likewise I recommend changing the wall colour and splurging on new bedding if you’re coming out of a relationship and want to find love. again. Clear out the past and welcome a bright, love-filled future.
Make space for making love
Marriage neglect shows up in many rooms in the house, but most commonly it’s the bedroom that tends to stagnate over the years. When we put energy into the house, we usually take care of the public spaces (kitchens, living rooms) first. Don’t get me wrong: the public spaces are important. They define the family culture, create space for spending time together with family and friends, and help us feel secure and confident no matter what the world throws our way. But the bedroom is no less important, because that is where we tend to our marriage, where we stand together and repair what the world wore down that day. When our bedroom is more about the work we have to do than the love we need to make, when it is filled with toys from the kids, papers from work, and laundry that needs folding, we miss an opportunity to nurture our marriage. You must have a time and place where you are allowed to rest, laugh, and touch, without anything else demanding your time and attention.
“You must have a time and place where you are allowed to rest, laugh, and touch, without anything else demanding your time and attention.”
Make room for your new partner
Be aware that once you’ve invested time and money making your home fit you just right, you may feel resistance to someone coming in and changing it. That’s normal. It’s also normal for your new partner to be looking around and wanting to make the house feel like their home, too. Of course, if you’ve fallen deeply enough in love to move in with someone, hopefully you’ll be eager to create a space that reflects you both.
Cohabitation works best when both partners work hard to make sure the other person feels at home in the house, no matter if it started out as “mine” or “yours.” It is much harder when one person is oblivious to the fact that someone has moved in but still feels like a guest in the house. It’s even worse when, like my client Amanda, you get married, move into your new husband’s home, and then discover that even though all the furniture and decorations were chosen by his ex-wife, he’s unwilling to change it because “he spent good money on all that furniture.” It took Amanda a while to help her new husband understand that without some changes to the space she would continue to feel like an outsider in her own home. Happily, he did finally agree to make the changes needed to turn “his house” into “their house.”
To make blending homes a positive experience, it’s important to ask your partner what they need from their home, to listen without judgement, and share what you need with them. Use this book to frame the conversation so that it doesn’t devolve into an argument about whether or not we should keep “your chair” or if there is room for “my books.” And enlist the help of a design psychology coach if you can’t figure it out on your own. If you’re committed to creating a home for two, there is almost always a way to achieve that goal.
Make room for the love you already have
When we commit to a partner, we commit to compromise and sharing – our feelings, our fears, our dreams, and our sofa. How we share our physical space can be a strong indicator of whether a relationship is a partnership, or a dictatorship. Many couples start off great, creating room for two, but over time one of the partners seems to get squeezed out of their own home. Entire sitcom episodes are dedicated to recliners that are banished along with their owner to the “man cave” once a woman takes over, but the joke can quickly go from amusing to damaging. Have you unconsciously turned “our home” into “my home?” If your marital home is perfectly decorated but only represents you, consider what that says about your feelings toward your spouse and what that suggests to the world about his or her place in your home. Consider bringing your spouse back into the space.
Clutter can become a weapon of marriage destruction, too, and can indicate signs of a neglected relationship. My client Beverly said this started in her home when she “borrowed” her partner’s home office “temporarily” to store some stuff she was meaning to donate. The little pile of stuff not only never quite left the office, it grew in size. Before long the “office” became nothing more than a storeroom, and her partner no longer had a place for their own creativity and growth. If your spouse has been craving a room of their own, make it a priority to carve out that space. It shows you support and respect them.