Home. It’s a simple word but can conjure complex thoughts and emotions. Positive feelings of joy and laughter, safety, feeling loved and comfortable. A place you can kick up your feet and feel 100% yourself. For others, it might be a topic of stress, contention, or danger. If where you are currently living doesn’t feel like home, it might bring instant feelings of hope for a future residence that feels like home.
Sometimes I think about how long it takes a new house to feel like home after a move. When does that place start feeling like home? Is it when family photos get hung on the wall, when you can drive to a local coffee shop without using your GPS, or when you stop bumping your toes when you go to the bathroom in the middle of the night? Is home the place you grew up? “I’m going home for the holidays” is shared in the isle of an airplane when you are flying away from the place you call home at the end of a night when you thank a friend for “driving you home.”
I guess home is all of these things…
Like so many aspects of life, it’s a word that lives in the grey, neither black nor white. It can be the place where you lay your head down at the end of the day and the place where your parents have your old high school trophies in the attic. It might also be the lake house you went to every Summer growing up, or the friend’s house that feels more like home than the place listed on your driver’s license. Home is all of these things.
As interior designers, we often think about the safety, functionality, and aesthetics of a home. For some people, aesthetics are about what trends are “in” and what’s “out”. For us at Rebecca Ward Design, it’s about making the home feel like the personality of our clients. What design style makes them happy and feel comfortable? Finding the answer to that question is what guides the aesthetic choices we make for each project. (If you need help with this, you can take our style quiz!)
We often think about how having a beautiful home that functions well can impact your physical and mental well-being, which is important of course! However, at the end of the day, home isn’t so much about what it looks like, it’s about the lives that are lived in it. It’s simply the place where you feel loved, accepted, and the most yourself.
This is what home means to me. What does home mean to you?
XOXO,
Lillian Janik
Associate Designer, Rebecca Ward Design
