There are mornings when my home seems to speak more clearly than usual, when the light falls a certain way across the kitchen table, the coffee smells especially strong, and something I’ve walked past a thousand times suddenly stands out. This morning, for me, it was a white linen chair I’ve owned since 2010, one I’ve never really loved since I got it from a Danish brand, one I don’t even like sitting in, and yet there it was again - almost glaring back at me, “Yeah, yeah, you’ll never get rid of me, I was too expensive”.
These moments matter because they’re rarely just about the object itself. I mean, really, eff that bossy little chair.
Yet the chair has won. I’ve hated it for 15 years and yet it remains.
It could be anything though - a chair, a vase, some painting, an old lamp, a wall color, a stack of books we no longer open, a shelf arrangement that once felt kinda cool but now feels like OG blogger days on Flickr. Any of these can become a sharp elbow nudge telling us that something isn’t working here anymore. The alignment is off. Bring me to the thrift shop or sell me online, please!
I’ve been feeling this more often lately, and I suspect it has something to do with becoming more attentive to the limited and precious nature of time since my son is suddenly twelve and I’m suddenly seeing wrinkles and grays and my naturally hooded eyes are hooding even more… So I find myself less interested in living with crap that doesn’t light me up. It feels harder to ignore that grinding friction of objects that always need to be maintained in some way - cleaned, moved, styled, or accommodated - wtf - when the truth is they don’t offer much in return, especially not comfort, meaning, or a sense of belonging.
What interests me most is how often our inner lives move ahead while the visible parts of our lives lag behind.
Let’s unpack that for a sec.
We change, sometimes dramatically but usually in ways so gradual we barely notice at first - lower boobs, dry skin on our legs, a chin hair (wait, this is becoming personal, ha ha), but our homes, wardrobes, habits, hair cut, even the slang we use, can remain firmly attached to younger us. Like some parts of younger us haven’t caught up with present-day-older-us.
Life has a way of playing us for a total fool whether we see it or not. We move through heartbreak and healing, through motherhood (a total mixed bag of extreme emotions that I could write a book about), burnout, grief, moments of hating our marriage, moments of loving our marriage, reinvention, desire (oh yes, even us older girls look at much younger men - I know, hand slap!) , exhaustion, freedom, creative shifts, and new rhythms of working and living, and somewhere along the way the young bird we once were gives way to an old hen, someone quieter or braver or softer or more discerning. But an old hen nonetheless.
Yet the spaces around us don’t always shift to reflect who we are - and so we find ourselves surrounded by clues from an earlier chapter, reminders of former tastes, aspirations, and choices that once felt entirely true and now feel a little foreign.
All you need to do is unpack a few boxes in the attic to experience this in real time.
Objects carry energy. They can hold onto a version of us that needed to perform, impress, belong, to appear polished or perfect, to look a certain way, or simply to cope (oh, yes, I know the TO COPE feeling). I’ve been noticing this in my own home and wardrobe. Sometimes I open my closet and pull out something and think, “Really Holly?”. I can only compare this to old perfume, the stuff we once wore a million years ago, and how a whiff of it can take us so far back yet we REFUSE to wear it today. Have you ever noticed that? Would you want to relive OBSESSION from Calvin Klein and actually wear it? Or spray your husband down with DRAKKAR NOIR?
There are things that once made perfect sense to me, perfume, objects, chairs, and clothes that genuinely expressed something real at the time, but now they feel slightly off, or sometimes very off. Because I liked my perfume example let me throw another at you. It’s like reading an old journal and hearing your voice but feeling no emotional attachment to any of what you’ve written. That feeling is how home things in the home can feel - like we recognize it but there’s no emotional attachment. That’s a signal worth paying attention to because it usually points to something deeper than decor or style - it points to identity, to change, to the ongoing work of becoming, evolving, growing.
Let’s say you decide you need to change your home - you recognize a lot of yourself in my words, what next? Well my dear, a dramatic overhaul or come to Jesus reinvention is not needed here… because that can become a ton of cash and emotional pressure. You don’t need to throw everything out and start over, or take a “find your style” quiz in some book, or chase some 20-something-influencer idea of a better life that exists mainly on Instagram.
The real beginning starts with honesty.
What feels heavy now? What feels too perfect? What feels inherited in the emotional sense, like a visual rule we absorbed somewhere along the way and never stopped to question? Or have we become totally trapped in a cult of beige? What in your home still reflects former you, or maybe a more restrained or quieter version of you, but not the lionness you are now, with all of your lived experience, complexity, and your strength?
I love asking these questions because they open a different door into styling and design, one that has less to do with trends and more to do with your inner truth. Since style is continually edited by life itself, shouldn’t our homes, wardrobe, hair cut, etc. change along with us? Of course darling, of course.
Many of us live with a lot of stuff. We amass mountains of objects that don’t fit us or our lifestyle anymore. This could be furniture that feels too minimalist for the kind of life we live now, especially if our home today is full of children, pets, noise, movement, and the mess of actual life. It might mean books we never loved, gifts from people who are no longer part of our life, art that no longer stirs anything in us, colors we’ve fallen out of love with, or rooms that look great on the ‘gram feel totally uncomfortable when we’re hanging out in them with our friends and family.
I feel a shift in myself when it comes to home mood… I desire more coziness, softness, texture, and more honesty, and to keep creating a home that feels like it contains evidence of me and my family rather than superficial evidence of what I do for a living in the design world. I always felt like I had eyes on me and my home since becoming a design blogger and later, an author of interiors books, designer of interior products, etc. I felt so much pressure to have the most perfect home - and I didn’t want to perform - so I spent many years not showing much of my home. Nowadays, I no longer feel the pressure to perform. I grew out of that stage in my life and career. Today, I want to see the things that matter to me now, including my son’s artwork, handmade pieces, imperfect objects with a pulse to them, things that feel soulful and personal and alive. I want less perfection and more presence, less pressure to make things appear a certain way and more freedom to let them simply be what they are.
Maybe we should focus less on making our homes prettier in the conventional sense, but to make them more truthful, more responsive to who we are now and who we’re becoming, while still leaving room for the objects that carry genuine memory and meaning. We’re often taught to ask whether a room looks good, but I always ask my clients first: How do you want this space to feel? That’s a good starting point for our homes.
Who you are today may be very different from who you were even a few years ago. You may long for calm where you once wanted stimulation, warmth where you once wanted minimalism, softness where you once wanted marble and metal, or beauty that comforts you offline rather than beauty that performs online. And the most beautiful rooms are rarely the most expensive or the most perfect; they’re the ones that feel inhabited by a real person, someone with stories, longings, contradictions, and a life that is still unfolding.
How about this: instead of rushing to make changes, we slowly walk through our homes with a notebook in hand and simply notice what feels off, what feels heavy, what we keep avoiding, and what we would rather be doing with the space if it felt more aligned with who we are now. We can ask ourselves what no longer serves us, what feels too polished or too permanent, what has become more decorative than meaningful, and what still feels like it belongs to a former version of ourselves rather than the life we are actually living today.
And maybe the deeper question is, as I said earlier: How do you want this space to feel?
Do you want it to feel softer, calmer, warmer, grounded, playful, more honest? Do you want it to hold more evidence of your actual life, more traces of your family, your creativity, your changing rhythms, your real priorities?
Here are some more questions you could ask:
What feels off in my room right now?
What am I keeping because it has been there for a long time, rather than because I truly still love it/use it?
What parts of this space seem to belong to previous me not current me?
If this room could feel more like my life today, or the life I am heading towards, what should be changed to bring it in alignment?
Once you begin noticing what no longer fits, you can’t quite unsee it, and that awareness, even when it’s uncomfortable at first, is often the very thing that opens the door to something better - to align home and life, honestly.
Hugs,
Holly
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