Relaxing Designs to Bring Peace to Your Home

With whatever life throws at you, your home should be a refuge from the stresses of everyday anxieties. The environment around us greatly affects our mood, so it’s important to take the necessary steps to ensure that our home decor is promoting a space built for tranquility.

Your home can either foster these feelings of peace and tranquility, or it can cause you even more stress and leave you tired and unenergized. Good design helps us create spaces that calm the mood and nurture our wellbeing.

Finding a calming color palette

Colors have a big effect on mood, and how you paint your walls can influence how you feel at home. In general, bright colors are more energizing and playful, while muted colors tend to be more soothing and calming. It’s usually recommended to have a neutral and muted color palette when painting the walls of your peaceful home, but that doesn't mean that you can’t have a little bit of fun by adding accent walls, wall paper, or pops of color through decoration. The color of a room can be easily manipulated, so feel free to play around with it until you find a color palette that works along with your relaxing home decor.

Emphasize spaces and functionality

Above all else, your home’s design should be functional. You should feel as if your home is working with you and comforting you and not fighting against you. That means that you can take something off a shelf without having everything else fall onto the floor, or you can comfortably walk around the living room without stubbing your toe on the coffee table. Everyone knows how frustrating it is to clean up and take care of avoidable messes and stresses, and a functional home stops the initial accident from even happening.

Part of having a functional home is placing everything with a purpose, almost in a feng shui way. Don’t just pile your pots, pans, documents, or belongings on top of each other where they are guaranteed to topple over or cause a mess. Be mindful of where you place things, and don’t be afraid of having empty spaces built into the relaxing designs of your home. A lack of space from clutter or furniture being too cramped together can create claustrophobia in a home, which is the opposite of tranquility.

Make it smell like home

Scenting the air is one of the fastest ways to induce a sense of serenity and relaxation in your home. Keep aromatherapy candles lit around the house to spread a scent of tranquility, or consider having vases of flowers on tables and shelves for a hint of nature and a fresh touch. If you want to go the extra mile, you can easily create your own scent by using a diffuser and essential oils, which also have health benefits associated with each fragrance. Nothing is more relaxing than the smell of home.

Incorporate glimpses of nature

Being surrounded by plants and nature automatically grounds you and brings about a feeling of serenity. Having house plants around your home helps to reduce anxiety, clean the air, and promote sustainability. If gardening isn’t your thing, then even just seeing visual glimpses of nature will do the trick. Consider adding some rustic touches of nature by bringing in some dried branches from outside or having some sort of natural view visible from your living room, bedroom, or study, where you spend most of your time.

Clear the clutter

Whether it's in your living room, bedroom, bathroom, office, or kitchen, clutter has a tendency to build up over time. We recommend keeping your surfaces free of random objects, paper, and clothing items in order to create a calming environment. It can be tempting to just dump items on the closest table or in a drawer, but don’t be afraid to throw things away to promote a more cohesive living space. Living in an organized space allows for calming energy to easily flow and for you to move throughout the space uninterrupted.

Don’t think lightly about lights

Choosing the correct lighting sets the tone of your serene home. It’s always recommended to allow as much natural light as possible, as it automatically increases productivity and elevates mood. If you live in a space without much natural light, strategically place reflective surface decorations around your home to instantaneously double the amount of light.

Of course, natural light doesn’t last forever, and you need to come up with a calming design lighting plan for the evenings and nights. Overhead lighting is necessary to have, but it can sometimes be a bit harsh for creating a peaceful home environment. Instead, you can supplement these lights with lamps, string lights, or wall lights. And to make things even cozier, light some candles to instantly warm the space and fill it with the feeling of a warm hug.

Engage the senses

The perfect soothing designs don’t just focus on the visual aspect, they also incorporate smell, touch, and sound. The smell of home, playing with textures through design or decoration, and the correct sound proofing or sound system all work together, along with visual design, to create a calming effect on your mind. An engaging space is a relaxing space, and the only way to truly engage yourself is through stimulating all your senses.

Kick back and relax

Your home is your sanctuary. It’s the place where you go to decompress and unwind. It’s the place where anxieties from your day to day life go to fizzle out. Relaxing designs and soothing home decor work to create this stress-free oasis you call home, something Ukio takes very seriously when curating our apartments. Find peace in your home wherever you are.