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How to Design a Home that Breeds Creativity
A guide for making spaces that inspire you and your guests
When was the last time you built a fort? The kind you build out of furniture, blankets, cardboard boxes, and the like. When we’re young, it is easy to be creative, and we can use anything to exercise our imagination at home. As we get older, we have to be more intentional about curating spaces that will incite our curiosity and our creative souls. The benefits of doing so are innumerable. We can design our homes to be places where our minds are activated and our maker spirits are illuminated.
This is a guide for those seeking to make their homes fertile ground for creativity. As you might envision, a creative home is not just about the artifacts inside the home. It is equally or more so about the culture and identity of the home and those who live in it.
“Home wasn’t a set house, or a single town on a map. It was wherever the people who loved you were, whenever you were together. Not a place, but a moment, and then another, building on each other like bricks to create a solid shelter that you take with you for your entire life, wherever you may go.” — Sarah Dessen
1. Intention — Give yourself permission to make your home creative.
“The pull of habit is so huge, and that’s what makes kids so beautifully creative, is that they don’t have any habits, and they don’t care if they’re any good or not, right? They’re not building a sandcastle going, ‘I think I’m going to be a really good sandcastle builder.’ They just throw themselves at whatever project you put in front of them — dancing, doing a painting, building something: any opportunity they have, they try to use it to impress upon you their individuality. It’s so beautiful.” — Ethan Hawke
In order to make our homes a breeding ground for creativity, we must first give ourselves permission to be creative. It seems like an obvious assertion, but so many of us limit ourselves…
