Does your home need a January detox too?
It’s the latest wellbeing fad. Purifying your living space to feel more zen. Here’s how...
YOu’ve cut back on the rioja. You’re on a diet. You’ve bought coconut oil and kale and joined an exercise class. 2018 is going to be your year of wellness. Job done, you think? Well, not quite . . . This is the year that ‘wellness’ — which has dominated eating and fitness for the past few years — will reach your home. It’s not enough for your body to be a temple: now your bathroom, bedroom and living room have to be, too.
We have known for a long time that design can affect the way we feel. But in 2018, the primary job of the home is apparently to be a retreat from a crazy world and the frenetic pace of life.
The wellness interiors trend — holistic homes? clean interiors? — is in large part a reaction to the way phones and computers have allowed work to invade every aspect of our lives. So if you’re fed up with lying in bed next to someone who’s dealing with emails, or sitting at your kitchen table while your family fixate on their mobile phones, this is one for you.
According to Nadia McCowan Hill, style adviser for interiors and décor retailer wayfair.co.uk, your ‘home should be a sanctuary’.
What Nadia calls ‘2018’s naturally balanced trend in the home’ is all about getting comfortable in calming spaces that are inspired by nature. Which sounds a bit like turning your home into a luxury spa retreat.
But how do you do that — especially if you live with a teenager who thinks the proper place for a used towel is on the bathroom floor?
I am definitely in the market for some domestic wellness. There are too many odd socks and trailing wires in my house for it ever to be described as zen. But I am also nervous. I have never got the hang of clean eating: my favourite food is a plate of pasta. Can I get the hang of clean interiors?
I arrive at Wayfair’s showhouse near Regent’s Park, dreading I’ll discover I have to fill my home with stones blessed by shamanic healers. (No doubt you can buy these on Gwyneth Paltrow’s wellness site, Goop — just $85 for a starter kit of eight stones).
Fortunately, wellness in the home turns out to be much more accessible than that: it’s mainly about using natural materials, keeping airpurifying plants, and a few clever tricks to create calming spaces. Nadia insists there are plenty of inexpensive ways to lift your mood: ‘Small items can make a huge transformation.’
My first impression is that there are masses of flowers — reds and pinks and oranges, chosen to be energising — and scented candles everywhere. Good, I think: flowers and candles don’t require much in the way of specialist decorating knowledge.
Then it occurs to me that flowers die and candles burn. If I’m going to spend money on getting spiritually aligned with nature, I want a fix that’ll last longer than a week.
We START in the kitchen, where one of the queens of the wellness movement, Melissa Hemsley, is skipping about cooking: egg yolks baked into avocados, and a sort of mash of spinach, feta, eggs and cumin seeds.
As half of Hemsley + Hemsley, Melissa has produced two cookery books, appeared in a Channel 4 show, opened a café in Selfridges and popularised the spiraliser, allowing devotees to substitute strings of courgette for spaghetti. This, I am afraid, is where wellness leaves me behind. I have nothing against courgettes in their place, but that place, in my opinion, is not replacing pasta.
Still, it’s impossible not to warm to Melissa as she bounces around the kitchen explaining how her preoccupation with healthy food translates into a love of healthy interiors.
Often, she says, the reason people don’t cook at home ‘is that it takes too long, and then they wolf their
food down and it’s gone in a flash. If you make the set-up nice, it makes eating mindfully easier.’
You’re more likely ‘to cook for yourself if your kitchen’s beautiful’, Melissa adds. ‘The table is as important as the cooking area.’
I think guiltily about my own kitchen table, which is littered with mail, homework and newspapers, none of it good for mindful eating. A feeling of oneness with the universe would be a lot easier if I had someone to follow my family around tidying up.
Melissa mentions that the kitchen island in her new home is made of recycled paper — which is eco-friendly, in keeping with the wellness vibe of using natural materials and with the trend for sustainable home furnishings.
The Wayfair kitchen is made of marble and wood but, says Nadia, glass, rattan or anything with a natural finish works well. ‘Be mindful of what you buy and, wherever possible, opt for wellmade pieces.’ More and more people are doing exactly that. The desire to stem the tide of plastic has gone beyond rejecting plastic bags, coffee cups and microbeads.
According to a survey by the British Woodworking Federation (BWF), this year one in four British homeowners intends to reduce the amount of plastic in their home.
The BWF’s Chief Executive Iain McIlwee says natural materials are biophilic — it means love of nature and it’s a buzzword in architecture and design. Biophilic design seeks to reconnect us with nature and recuperate mental and physical energy.
‘We’re drawn to natural materials, which are more tactile, warm, and welcoming,’ says McIlwee.
If you can’t afford extensive carpentry or marble counter tops, you can get at least some of the way with colours.
Natural, soft shades are the hues for calmer interiors, Nadia says, and the colours to choose for your plates and bowls are ‘peach, mint and sage’.
Colour influences perceptions and psychologists say green is the colour of balance, harmony and restoration; peach puts us in a tranquil, nurturing and warm state of mind.
There are a couple of plants on the counter top, along with pomegranates, spinach and seeds, and lots more of them arranged on shelves at the other end of the kitchen. Indoor plants are generally reckoned to be one of the cheapest and easiest ways to improve your mental and physical health. Not only are they moodboosting but they are natural air purifiers, removing common household chemicals from the air. Particularly good are fleshy-leaved plants such as peace lilies, ficus and cheeseplants (not seen since the Eighties, but now back in fashion). Mother-in-law’s tongue works at night, absorbing carbon dioxide and giving out oxygen while you sleep.
This seems a good point to go upstairs, calling in first on the bathroom, which is designed to be a pampering space.
‘Everyone has a bathroom, so everyone can create their own little home spa,’ Nadia says.
Here, the me-time mood is helped by more candles and tasteful Turkish towels draped over a bath that has been filled with petals.
It’s a beautiful room, but I can’t help thinking that if I filled my bath with petals, I’d spend ages fishing out the soggy bits.
This bathroom has been effectively decluttered. (I think guiltily of my bathroom shelves, littered with half-empty bottles of moisturiser and bits of makeup.) Decluttering has been a thing for a while now, but the evidence is that it’s here to stay.
This year there’s something called Swedish death cleaning,
döstädning, which involves looking at your possessions and pondering what will happen to them after you die.
Margareta Magnusson, the eightysomething Swedish artist whose book, The Gentle Art Of Swedish Death Cleaning, came out in Britain last month, insists this can be done at any stage of Colour boost: Geraldine gets comfy on the sofa in Wayfair’s show home life. If the worst comes to the worst, your slimmed-down legacy will reflect well on you — and if you don’t die, you’ll be living a less cluttered life.
Nadia also recommends the 1212-12 challenge, popularised by U.S. minimalism guru Joshua Becker. This involves identifying 12 things in your house each day that you want to keep, 12 to throw away and 12 to donate.
Becker suggests turning this into a competition with your husband, and even your children, ensuring everyone not only throws things away, but gets the rest of their stuff organised.
The showhouse bedroom is pared-down, designed to be ‘soothing, sensory and tactile’, with lavender bags littered about, lavender-coloured bedding and more candles, while the sitting room has been designed to demonstrate how bright colours lift the mood. There is lots of yellow, which psychologists say reminds us of sunshine; red, for energy and stimulation; orange for passion and fun; and blue, which induces serenity and optimism.
THE trick here seems to be a few big neutral pieces — a sofa upholstered in grey and a cane chair — with colour pops from hot-pink stripes on wicker baskets and sunshine-yellow cushions, not to mention all those flowers.
Duly cheered up, I go across the hall into the office — which, by contrast, is strictly black-andwhite, clean-cut, unfussy and aimed at maximising productivity without distraction. I think of my cramped office with its overflowing in-tray, printer, piles of padded envelopes and filing that isn’t quite filed. In this office, people are apparently able to do their work with a few pencils.
There’s no doubt that I’d be more productive if I could work in a space like this — but then, where would I store all those envelopes? It seems the secret of being zen in the home is probably cupboards, and lots of them.
Nadia says that in this new world of being kind to yourself, you don’t have to be a minimalist. But the problem with my stuff is that it’s less collected than randomly accumulated.
My visit over, I go home determined to put my own house in order. I may not be able to afford to replace my furniture, but I can at least eat mindfully, meditate in the bedroom and put plants on my kitchen worksurface. Generally, I can bear in mind Nadia’s advice that ‘a well-curated space makes you happy. The idea is that you should be the best person you can be, underpinned by homeware’.
I put a plant on my work surface. It gets in the way (the surface is not very big) but I breathe deeply. My home is a sanctuary. I own green bowls. 2018 is the year of the new zen me.