Character over clutter
“Every single thing in my home contributes to my wellbeing, from the weight of my cutlery to the feel of my sheets.”
ACE Hotel Brooklyn
We have no time for clutter. It’s bad for your mental health. But that doesn’t mean you can’t fill your house with things that have meaning to you.
Being able to peer into everyone else’s worlds through curated grids does two things; it gives us an enormous amount of choice when it comes to our style at home, but also makes us believe things need to be precise. But actually… what are we like off grid?
An estate agent might describe a space as a much loved family home - code for messy and incoherent with no sense of discernible style. That’s probably because you’ve got your kid’s art on the wall, yellow leopard print wallpaper and a chipped green vase in the hallway that you picked up at your favourite market.
And to be clear, there’s nothing wrong with that. Do the leopards make you smile? Do the drawings remind you that you’re home? Then go for it. Life’s too short to hang on the thin threads of fashion and trends. But the question you need to answer is, what do you actually like?
You’ve got to work that out. Allow yourself to be sensitive to your environment. Your wellbeing and happiness, defined by your ability to cope with life and all its curve balls, is profoundly affected by your environment. You can control that by making conscious choices about what you surround yourself with. And that doesn’t have to be about the must-haves. You might yearn for a bit of mess, for things to not be quite so buttoned up.
It’s simply about the things that resonate with how you want to feel. Your home should be about your youness. We need to embrace a profound shift towards giving ourselves permission to do whatever we want in our homes, and an interior designer’s job is to help you do that with a little consistency.