We spend a lot of our time within the confines of our homes – lately, even more so. This is where life takes place, so, when we think about what we want in life, the home needs to be on the mind. Our houses, with their various sectioned-off areas for different aspects of the living experience, should be the focus as we set off to design better, happier lives. After all, doesn’t it only make sense that our homes would be the ideal places to find happiness?
Why Aren’t We Happy at Home?
Unfortunately, happiness hasn’t always been the main objective in mind when houses are designed. Architects have often been led by what they can create cheaply and easily and by what’s popular at the current moment. Interior design also gets swept up by trends again and again. Shaped by a history of practicality overriding emotions and the latest fashion being the priority when any sort of aesthetic was considered, the homes we currently reside in are not made for happiness.
And so, the truth is that these homes do not make us happy. Most people nowadays are essentially unhappy. The solution to this prevalent unhappiness though really could start in the home, if only our homes were designed with happiness in mind.
How to Find More Happiness in Your Home Today
While our homes are not havens of happiness for most of us, it doesn’t have to be this way. Happiness might not have been on the architect’s mind when they designed your house, but it can be on yours. By focusing on the ability to find happiness, you can achieve a transformation of the home and what it means for you. You can make your home the place that makes you happy.
It doesn’t even take a whole lot. Even the smallest details can make their difference in the feelings an environment evokes. Just a change of colors of lighting or the addition of some natural decor can be enough to get you started. As long as a focus on happiness guides all your design decisions, you will soon have a house that really makes you smile.
Choose the Right Colors
There are certainly a lot of color choices that go into an interior design process. Maybe you’ve never wanted to bother with choosing colors or maybe you’ve always gravitated towards a favorite regardless of the particular use. But colors can matter much more that you might realize. Putting a priority on an interior design outcome that makes us feel best may therefore mean considering the proven principles of color psychology to guide you.
Yellow is the happiest color, while gray is the unhappiest. Overall, there is a preference for natural shades like the many browns and greens of a forest and the blue of the sky. With an understanding of how certain colors make us feel, you may liven up the whole house with just a bit of paint. If you aren’t looking to dive too deep into redecorating, accent decorations in the right color can also help to achieve the right effect.
Lots of Light
Letting some light in is another way to let more joy into the home. It’s natural to love a brightly-lit interior, especially if it’s lit with the natural light of the sun. After all, while dark, dreary days can be upsetting, sunshine is almost always associated with positivity and pure joy. So, why wouldn’t you want to bring that sunshine into your house?
If you’ve got lots of windows, you’ve got exactly what you need for lots of light. Open the blinds and pull the curtains back to let that sunshine in. You might even want to put a mirror opposite from the window to reflect and multiply that light.
Bring Nature Inside
While you’re welcoming in the sunlight, you may also want to invite some other elements of nature into the home. It has been scientifically proven that spending time in natural environments improves overall happiness. For some of us, there are lots of ways to go out and enjoy nature. If you live in a city where an escape to nature just isn’t possible though, there are still ways to bring nature to yourself.
Give plants a place in your home. Really, you might want to give them multiple places. A bouquet of fresh flowers on the kitchen table, succulents decorating your desk, even a forest of ferns in the living room – these are all lovely ways to bring a bit of nature indoors.
A Nice and Tidy Environment
A lot of designing your home for happiness isn’t about adding elements, even though there is plenty of value in the addition of plant life, but about removing the clutter you don’t need. Think about it. Do you enjoy being in a room that feels like it’s closing in on you with all the stuff piled up? Or isn’t there something nice and calming about a simple space with all the necessities but minimal decor?
A chaotically-cluttered room can easily create for you an equally chaotic mind. It’s nice to be able to relax somewhere that is devoid of all the distractions that decor and similar clutter can become.
You don’t have to be a hoarder for your home to be lacking this serenity and peace. Maybe it’s simply time to declutter and reorganize. It can be hard to get strict with yourself, but if you don’t need or even really want something, it’s better to get rid of it. In the end, you’ll be happier.
Create an Actual Home
At the heart of purposefully searching for happiness in the home is remembering that these are the places that we live. As tempting as it might be to want to emulate the model home looks we see in magazines or on Instagram, those are not real examples of homes that people live in. An actual home does not make for a perfect picture. If designed right, it makes, hopefully, for a pretty good life.
So, design your home for that happy life that you’re trying to have. Organize the kitchen and dining room to be those central hubs of conversation and connection. Go after comfort instead of a sleek style when deciding on the living room. Make your bedroom into a real sanctuary for sleep. Design for a life spent in happy moments and you will have designed for happiness.
A Happy Home
Designing homes for happiness can start now with you and the little decisions you make. It doesn’t have to stop there though. Lot of professional architects and interior designers know what it takes to design homes with happiness in mind, and many of them want to do so. If priorities can collectively shift, we may just see a happier framework in place for the home of the future.
