How to start telling your story of home - giving yourself permission to live your own unique life.

I believe personal story telling is at the heart of any home – and that a home should be a long and rambling poem of your life – and only your life.

As we slide towards holiday rest, I think it’s the perfect pause point to think about how you would like your home to feel and more importantly – how you and yours would like to like to live. This quiet and possibly uncomfortable focus is incredibly important. It saves much time and money in the long run, but I believe that it also saves your heart. And home is your heart.

When we are welcomed into anyone’s home, we hope to catch a whiff of who they are. We want to understand their likes, dislikes, views, and overall approach to life. And we hope that it chimes comfortably with the person themselves. Of course, we want to know what it looks like—but once we’ve clocked the cooker, the lights and the art, our primary reaction will be to how it feels – and how we feel inside it.

Equally, when you welcome people into your own home, you are showing them a very personal manifestation of who you are. Whether you are tidy, foodie, arty or none of the above. It can be frightening, but it shouldn’t be. Your home should be your storyteller—the weaver of the red thread and a marker of your life.

To create an honest interpretation of your home you need to be aware of your own aesthetic roots—who you were, who you are now and who, and what, has influenced you on the way.

Take time to remember what shaped and excited you as a child, as much as your own considerations as an adult. My childhood home felt like home mostly because our family pets were buried under the apple tree, and it gave me a great sense of comfort and place. This means my home now is centred around animals and wild orchard-like gardens. I feel imbalanced without these things.

I believe it is also critical to positively ignore what anyone else thinks you should do. Your mother, best friend or lifestyle influencer have no idea of that particularly unique thread that you and your family need to thrive. They are looking at your home from their own perspective of you and their relationship to you. Or in the case of brand marketing, what they want you to buy to neatly fit in with their desires.

When I start a new project, I always create a visual curation, or story board. A pictorial manifestation of your thoughts is incredibly powerful. It is important it isn’t an online image board, but a physical cut out and keep ‘how-do-I-want-to-live-in-my-home and how do I want it to feel’ storyboard. It needs to be your eyes, hands and mind working in unison. Like all simple and pure creative processes, you just need a really large piece of card, glue/tape, a stack of printed material, some writing tools and scissors.

Pull out images, words, and colours from the magazines, catalogues, brochures, tickets, postcards from exhibitions, poems, paint charts—anything that speaks to you. Print off anything you’ve stored on your phone or computer too. Note that this storyboard isn’t the place to create a shopping list of things you’d like to buy—you can do that later. Try not to use images of anything that’s on-trend, because what comes in will go out and this process isn’t about that.

Then create a visual board of what home is to you—something that shows an outward expression of what you want it to feel like. Cut things out, move them around and paste a collage together. You can lay it out and take pictures with your phone and move images around before you finally commit. Write on it if you want to. Add some colour swatches—whatever it is that makes this board a true representation of what home is to you.

Once you have done this, you’ll see a rich and beautifully unique story emerging. It isn’t easy, but it is worth it. I think this is the very best place to start understanding how to create a home that reflects you. Put it somewhere you can see it every day. Live with it, change it, but take your time to be certain it is you.

Because creating a personal space isn’t a race, it’s your home.