Thoughts on Taking Your Home (and Style) Less Seriously

If you’re not having fun, read this.

My phone’s photo album is my diary. I am a visual learner through and through, a person who can look at one photo of a poorly-lit plate of noodles and usher in a flood of memories beyond the framed edges. 

Recently, I noticed something a tad nefarious about how I look back in time. I revisit the past to look for answers to unanswerable questions, often with a shotty memory of questionable (and biased) data. I look back at these photos not for nostalgia or to find the courage to move boldly out of thought and into action. I look back to measure. 

I measure where I’ve been compared to where I am now. A benchmark of what has changed between then and now. I’ve done this with boxes of momentos, report cards from elementary school, and pieces of writing long forgotten. 

I was looking at old photos of our home recently and thinking about the design decisions we made early on while making updates. I still like what we did overall, but I wonder why I changed certain things. With the power of hindsight, I noticed something I hadn’t before: 

My home may look colorful and happy on Instagram, but the design process hasn’t been.

Making Room for Delight

When we moved into this home in 2020, I felt lost and uninspired creatively, but I didn’t feel I could stop and acknowledge this reality. I probably didn’t even know how to define it as such at the time. I relied a lot on outside opinions to influence my decisions because I didn’t know what I wanted. Outsourcing opinions was a way to combat my indecision and, so I thought, a better way of making the “right” choice for every tiny detail. Spoiler alert: I was totally wrong about this! 

I learned during this period that there are no “right” answers, only a series of good options. What I didn’t understand is that you don’t have to put yourself through hell while selecting one. 

Creating our home is supposed to be fun. It’s meant to be restorative. It’s a hobby you and I have been called to. We see the value in beautiful spaces. So why does it all feel so serious sometimes? 

I’ve shared some musings on Instagram lately about the idea of taking ourselves and our homes less seriously. People have responded to this topic—so much so that it seems like a way of being many of us are yearning to experience. I wanted to explore this idea more deeply, particularly as it relates to how we design and decorate our homes.