The key to creating the perfect home, is to create a warm home, and I don’t mean warm as in temperature rather warm as in atmosphere. A warm home will make you feel like you belong as soon as you enter, which is exactly how most of us want our guests to feel. A warm home is easy to create with the same decorating techniques that we talk about often.

How To Create A Warm Home

When looking to create a warm home you need to work with the layers. The layers of life are what gives our home a comfortable feel but spike our interest bringing a guest from entry to the entertaining spaces. Layers of our personalities, our travels and our loves not only show who we are, but give the home a personality of its own.

Start With The Floor

Bare floors feel just that, bare. Give them some warm love by adding rug wherever you can. Lounge rooms, under dining tables, entries, bedroom even on the decks or entertaining spaces. Rugs do wonders for sense of warmth in a room, essential layering.

As you can see above the texture and colour in this rug from Unique Rug Store, it not only draws the eye, but effectively breaks up the orange colour in our old floor boards and creates a base layer for the room. Floor boards are gorgeous, but appear “cold” when not layered on.

Add Throw Rugs

Hannah Puechmarin Rachael Honner

Throw rugs are an effective decorating tool, especially for adding warmth to our homes. Heavier textured rugs in Winter are not only cosy to snuggle up too, they feel warm in the room too. In Summer swap out the heavy throws to lightweight throws which still add layering value without feeling hot.

Above is a combination of our Summer and Winter decor for our room, that we use in Autumn. The grey spread on the bed is lightweight and the texture is really fine, it looks light and cool. The dark grey throw is a heavy cable knit for so this time of year, if used at it’s full thickness it tends to be very heavy, so folding it under the cool white sheet, brings texture and warmth but not heat.

Use Personality In Your Vignettes

The vignettes you scatter around your home are an opportunity to really share your personality. Use photos of your family or your travel, include objects of interest you have purchased especially if they have a story attached. That pile of books you use as a base to a vignette is a great place to store those books you purchased from the theater, pop your concert tickets in a frame, or use that doily that your grandmother made.

Vignettes are perfect for sharing you while decorating your home. These points of interest will draw your visitors into the story of you which is exactly what your home should be.

The vignette above, is one of my favourite in my home. The pink book it is sitting on was a gift from a business breakfast I attended with a great friend, we shared many laughs that day and it makes me smile every time I think about it. The drawing was a gift from another gorgeous friend of our Pen Y Llechwedd, the binoculars are antique and purchased from an Instagram friend, the candle was the first of my own range. So you can see, these are all little bits of me, they reflect my loves and who I am. This is what you need to aim for when decorating for warmth.

Lighting

Hannah Puechmarin Rachael Honner

If I had to choose one element only to improve the warmth in a home, it would be the lighting. Just think of how you feel when you walk into a shop with it’s bright white fluro lighting, we want the opposite at home. Warm white globes with the filter of the lamp shade are perfect for making you feel warm in a room.

Creating a warm home is all about how you make it feel. Every home has the capability to feel warm, they are just blank canvases waiting for your touch and personality.

Have you walked into a home and just felt you belong? How do you make your home feel warm?

Nicole xx