Making A House A Home

This recent article from AGBeat, “Exterior Design Trend Spotting: Creative House Address Markers” got me intrigued by what homeowners are doing to personalize their homes and express themselves creatively. When recent home buyers finally get to occupy their new home, the urge to make a house into a home often involves renovations, alterations, and expansions.

Why do we decorate our homes? Perhaps the most obvious reason is that we want our homes to look nice. While everyone’s idea of what’s cozy and visually pleasing is different, we all put effort into the way our homes look because we want to feel a certain way when we occupy and visually perceive our homes. Interior decorators know that there are certain aspects of our physical surroundings—shapes, colors, lights and shadows—that can make us experience certain emotions. By applying these ideas to an individual’s home, an interior designer or decorator can create spaces that complement the homeowner’s personality and values.

After reading through the Agent Beat article, I did a quick search for more out-of-the-box home decorations/personalizations. Oddee’s list of the “12 Most Creative Home Wallpapers” features some strange, imaginative, and downright odd decoration ideas, including wallpaper made of wood planks (the Bear’s Cave). The OLED wallpaper is innovative and beautiful, a “light-emitting wallpaper happily straddles the fence between kiddie night-light and inventive design feature. It’s eco-credentials: turning a two-dimensional surface into a light source versus the traditional bulb/lamp construct.” Calfinder’s list of “5 Creative and Wacky Home Improvements” covers everything from an indoor tree house to a slide alongside the stairway.

While renovations and designs like these may be out of the reach of the average homeowner, they do illustrate the basic concept of creating a home environment that is entirely yours. Whatever the scale, this is a an end that every homeowner pursues in some way—whether it’s simply a picture in a frame or a house-wide interior design changeup, we all alter the spaces we live in.