Utilizing Every Space
Reorganize Your Way To Your Dream Home
You don’t need to rebuild to create your dream home. By rethinking the way you use your space, you can love your place now. Your home’s pain points might actually be solved with clever reorganization and thinking outside the box. If your living space is small, don’t let your home's size limit its potential uses!
Below are some examples of ways to rethink your space:
Create Indoor/Outdoor Connections
When you minimize visual obstructions between interior to exterior views, it increases the connection between these spaces. The improved indoor to outdoor connection creates the feeling of a more expansive space and also nurtures the innate human desire for proximity to the natural environment.
“In roughly 10,000 short years, the environment in which we live changed from entirely natural, to almost exclusively artificial. Despite all this environmental change, one thing remains the same – the bond we forged with nature and the natural world.” - Ambius.com
Open Up Rooms
Consider removing walls or other elements in order to see from one end of your home to the other. You can also maximize your home by integrating spaces that play off each other such as living/dining, kitchen/dining, mudroom/laundry room, etc. Doing so makes smaller rooms feel larger by selectively opening them up to each other and the main circulation paths.
Rethink Lighting
Lighting greatly affects the feel of a space. Obviously, windows bring in natural light but what about windowless rooms? We advise adding skylights and/or glass doors to improve natural light in these areas of the home. Use artificial lighting strategically to enhance your space as well. Bright and welcoming spaces feel larger than rooms with too few light sources and too much shadow.
Make Odd Elements and Spaces Work for You
Does your home have some existing structural oddities such as awkwardly located wall jaunts, an old unused chimney, wasted space under stairs or above cabinets? Consider mitigating these existing elements with clever design solutions. You can use them to create extra storage or build in needed functionality while concealing (or celebrating) them.
Switch Rooms Around
You may find that your home’s current layout isn’t optimal for your needs, maybe your kitchen would make more sense where your bedroom is and vice versa. Think about your daily routines and your lifestyle needs; by mapping out your ideal use of spaces you can rethink the organizational flow of the rooms in your home.
The primary purpose of a home is to protect and shelter and beyond that, it becomes all about how you enjoy your space. How do you use your home, what is your idea of comfort, what does ‘home’ mean to you? The answers to these questions vary greatly from one person to the next and will reveal how to reinterpret your current house into your dream home. Want to discover ways to add flexibility to your home? Contact us to start the conversation.
