When your home is cozy and inviting, you always have the ideal place to relax, entertain guests, or enjoy time with your family. A welcoming home is remembered for all the right reasons, so it’s well worth taking the time to make your house as cozy as possible. With these handy tips, you can ensure your home is always the welcoming, warm, and inviting:
Overhaul your front door
Your front door is usually the very first thing people see when they approach your property and you pass through it every day. If you want to make your home cozier, this is the place to start. Whether you have a porch, steps leading up to your door, or a large driveway, you can enhance the exterior of the property to create a welcoming entryway.
If you have a wooden front door, sanding it and repainting it will transform how it looks and feels. What’s more, it won’t take more than a day or two to complete the project. uPVC front doors are easy to keep clean, so take the time to wash the doors and windows on a regular basis.
New door furniture – such as a letterbox, knocker, and spy hole – completes the look and makes the whole area feel brand new. Add a welcoming sign or potted plants to finish your project and create a home that’s cozy from the outside in.
Make your hallway more welcoming
Once you step through your front door, chances are you’ll be standing in the hallway. As this area isn’t typically used for relaxing, dining, or sleeping, homeowners tend to overlook its importance. However, it’s the first part of your interior that people will see when they step inside, so it sets the tone for the rest of the property.
If your hallway is fairly small, hang a large mirror on the wall. By reflecting the light, a mirror will illuminate the area and make it feel bigger. What’s more, you’ll want to check your appearance before you leave the house, so having a mirror in the hallway is always useful.
A coat stand, wall hooks, and a small table are all great additions to hallways but why not consider a bench or chair too? This adds a homely feel and makes your hallway feel undeniably welcoming.
Choose warm colors
When you’re decorating your home, you’ll probably spend a good amount of time consider what colors to use. However, few people realize that any color can have warm or cool tones. It’s actually the tone of the color, rather than the shade, that has the most impact in a room. When you use warm tones, it instantly makes a room feel cozier.
If you want to create an atmosphere that helps you to relax and feel safe and secure, warm tones are certainly what you’re looking for. Spend a little time with color swatches before you make your final selection and you’ll soon see what a difference the tone makes.
Make your bedroom a haven
Getting enough sleep every night should be a top priority but you’ll struggle to get a decent night’s rest if your bedroom isn’t relaxing. With the right colors and textures, however, you can turn your bedroom into a haven.
Ideally, you want to avoid having a home office or storage area in your bedroom, as this can disrupt your sleep pattern. However, this doesn’t mean you can’t adorn your bedroom with stunning furniture. Pieces from Ashley Furniture bedroom collections, for example, combine function with aesthetics to create stunning bedroom surroundings. No matter what your tastes are, you can choose beds, closets, drawers, and side tables that reflect your personality and style.
Use natural materials
Incorporating natural materials into your home increases the coziness factor and makes each room feel more inviting. Stripping back the floorboards, having a wooden dining table, or draping a woolen throw over the back of the couch are great ways to bring natural materials to the fore.
Savvy designers have made it easy to find natural materials in a range of styles, so there are no limits when it comes to choosing this type of furniture. Whether you favor traditional interior design or something more contemporary, you can make natural materials a critical part of your home.
Add textures throughout your home
When people are decorating their homes, they often focus on color but it’s easy to overlook textures. In fact, everything has a texture, so it has a major impact on how a room looks and feels. Varying the textures you use can enhance how inviting and cozy your home is. From soft leather to warming wool and cool cotton to organic bamboo, there are endless options to explore.
Remember – texture can be used to enhance every room, so don’t limit the use of varying textures to just the living area. Placing a throw on the end of your bed adds a new texture, for example. Placing a wall hanging in the hallway or corridor is an easy way to add texture to high traffic areas.
Use rugs to enhance rooms
As hardwood, laminate, and tiled floors have become increasingly popular, more homeowners are choosing to use rugs to make their homes cozier. Although hardwood, laminate or tiled floors can look stunning, they can be fairly cold underfoot. Placing rugs on the floor is a useful way of making rooms warmer, both literally and figuratively.
Of course, you don’t have to have hardwood floors in order to enhance the room with a rug. Carpeted floors can look great with the addition of a rug, particularly if you choose a different texture, pattern, and color.
When placing rugs, be sure to check whether they move when you walk on them. This can be a tripping hazard but there are simple ways to make rugs more stable. By adding non-slip strips underneath the rug, you can secure them in place without any worries.
Enhance the lighting
Bright, overhead lights might be necessary for the workplace, but they aren’t a great choice for a cozy home. While you might need slightly brighter lights in the kitchen or in your home office, you’ll want to incorporate different lighting options throughout your home.
Again, warm tones make a big difference, so try out different lightbulbs until you find the right ones for your home. This might depend on how much natural light flows into the property, so choosing different bulbs for different rooms is a sensible idea.
Statement lighting is always eye-catching, while wall lights and lamps offer soft and cozy lighting in any room. By choosing lights which have in-built dimmer switches or color-changing bulbs, you can always create the perfect atmosphere in your home.
Include vintage pieces
Adding antique or vintage pieces to your interior design instantly makes your home feel cozier. If you enjoy contemporary décor, it’s easy to blend modern styles with older pieces. Perhaps you have furniture that’s been passed down through your family? Alternatively, you might have picked up some older pieces at antique stores, flea markets, or garage sales?
Wherever your vintage pieces have come from, incorporate them into your home and blend styles to create something truly unique. While restoring older pieces can give them a new lease of life, using them ‘as is’ and enjoying their distressed, much-loved appearance is just as effective.
Check your seating
When you invite guests over or people drop in unexpectedly, you’ll want to be able to invite them to sit down. If you’re short on seating space, it might be time to invest in a new couch or a set of dining chairs. Although they’ll come in handy when you have people over, it will also give you more space to relax and unwind.
If you spend the majority of your family time in the living room or den, this is the first place to focus on when it comes to seating. If it’s uncomfortable, you’ll find that people naturally move away from the area, which can reduce the amount of time you spend with one another. By choosing sofas, chairs, and recliners that are more comfortable, the room instantly becomes cozier and more welcoming.
Install a wood burner
If your home has functional fireplaces, you’ll already know just how cozy a roaring fire can be. If you don’t have fireplaces, you can recreate the effect with a small wood burner. Of course, you will need to ensure that it’s properly installed, and that smoke can escape the property safely. Alternatively, choose an electric model that recreates the appearance of a log fire to increase the coziness without the risk of having an open flame inside.
Keep Your Home Cozy
Updating your home as the season changes allows you to make the most of interior design trends and gives you the chance to enhance the coziness of the property every few weeks. By making relatively minor changes, you can transform your property regularly and keep it feeling cozier than ever.
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