Make your home a relaxing refuge
Everyday life should feel like being at a soothing hotel
With increasingly stressful lives filled with a growing influx of emails, text messages and content crammed into a 24-hour day that refuses to expand, our homes need to be refuges that rejuvenate, relax and revitalize us. After all, they’re likely where we spend the most important moments of our lives with the most important people in our lives.
But for many, home is just another source of stress. Coming home to an obstacle course of shoes in the entryway, coats strewn on the banister and a mountain of mail on the countertop fails to hit the reset button for most of us. So, instead, we trudge through, mark the days until vacation and self-soothe with dreams of a luxury getaway where visual pollution is virtually unheard of.
The best vacation properties in the world, after all, have perfected their interiors to instantly soothe. It’s their goal to take care of you from the minute you enter the lobby to the minute you depart, with every design decision deliberately made to ensure that you’re rejuvenated, relaxed and revitalized just as your own home should be doing but likely isn’t.
On a recent trip to Amsterdam, I had the opportunity to stay at the Conservatorium, an early 20th-century bank turned music conservatory before it became one of Europe’s most renowned hotels for putting guests at ease.
While there, I paid particular attention to the design decisions that made my stay so restorative. And I concluded that many of these choices can be easily transposed into almost any home environment. It’s hard for brows to stay furrowed and shoulders to remain tense when you walk into an environment that is organized and well-conceived to warmly welcome you. From the lobby to the rooms, I took away the deliberate design choices that ultimately became my most valuable souvenir from the trip.
Here’s what I learned:
First impressions count: Top hoteliers know that the lobby is one of the most important parts of a luxury property because it sets the tone for your stay. Not dissimilar to what you see when you first go through your own home’s door, being greeted warmly and calmly by a space void of chaos and disorganization takes your temperature down and initiates the process of relaxing the mind.
No matter how small your space, consider creating some kind of “foyer” replete with storage for mail, keys and the dog leash, even if it’s just an attractive box with a hinged lid. Removing these everyday necessities from your immediate sight, but putting them somewhere easily accessible, will provide you with a more pleasant introduction to your home by reducing the visual clutter.
Implement symmetry: Symmetry is a powerful force in our world and inherently comforting because it often works as a visual organizing device. Through visual balance, symmetry helps to create organization and order, and top properties like the Conservatorium know this. By employing design choices such as matching table lamps atop identical nightstands and double sinks mirrored about the centerline of a vanity top, structure and a message of order is built in, creating a soothing environment to facilitate relaxation.
Reset your space: Whether we realize it or not, everything in our environment sends us messages and we have control of those messages. When you come home to shoes randomly sitting on the floor, those shoes send you the