While there is no doubt that the idea of home is a dynamic and evolving concept, many thoughts and concerns that are on our minds today have accompanied those interested in homemaking since the industrial revolution changed the nature of home. In ‘Hints on House Furnishing’ Sparrow highlights three values which he deems essential for good design that hold as true today as they did 110 years ago…
An understanding of how to be authentic is not always a given. Modern Western culture praises individuality and authenticity but there is little formal structure in place in our culture and our systems to help individuals to cultivate the ability to listen to their innermost voice. We have an innate desire for authenticity; being connected to ourselves, knowing what we feel, and being able to act on this understanding was a crucial survival mechanism for our ancestors. But cultivating this ability is a practice...
The growing number of us living in cities and the resulting communal pressure of city life are some of the reasons why so many of us feel a deep longing to reconnect with nature. Stepping out of the digital and virtual and into the real, tangible and natural offers one of the most revitalising elixirs to modern living. For those who experience the longing to feel more connected with the natural world even when indoors, we have put together a few suggestions for how to create a natural home.
There are design aspects that can seem so small that they are practically unnoticeable. And yet by learning to attend to all the little details and learning to implement them mindfully, we can begin to tell a coherent story of how we want our home to feel and the life we want to unfold within it. We highlight a few of the small details worth attending to when it comes to designing the interiors in our homes.
Home is such an integral part of our private lives and yet many of us have spent little time thinking about the feeling of home in much detail. What is it that makes a house feel like a home? Or what it is that makes us feel at home even in places we have never been to before?
Navigating modern life, with all of its complexities, is not always easy. Modern day living demands a lot form us, often at a pace that can feel unsustainable and hard to keep up with. One of the challenges of our time is that our current culture often seems to assess our value as people through the amount of measurable success we have had in areas deemed worthy of admiration: money, prestige and fame, career. And while many of these achievements can be important contributors to thriving, they are but a small fraction of the abundance of diverse ways human beings can lead fulfilling lives...
There are ways of looking at design that can make it feel somewhat frivolous. Aesthetic concerns are, after all, a luxury not granted to all. But the more in-depth we explore this subject the more the evidence seems to suggest that beyond the mere impact of aesthetics, design can impact how we feel and what we do...