Does your home suit you all the year round? How do you feel about those four walls and the floor beneath you? When it’s spring, is it suitably warming and homely? During the autumn, does it help you feel cozy inside, when all the leaves are falling outside? And what about summer time? It’s often touted as the best time of year, so what about making sure your home feels summer-y all the year round?
The summer time is a wonderful period of the year. After all, the sun is out, the sky is blue, and there’s plenty of opportunities to hit the beach and enjoy the waves! And if you’ve got kids to take with you too, they’re going to be out of school and dreaming of the summer forever – it’s a lovely time of year, no matter who you are or how old you are, and that’s why we need a little more of it at home right now.
So, when it comes to creating a permanent summer scene within your own home, you might have a bit of work to do! But thankfully, we’ve collected together some tips to get you started below. We all have different impressions of the summer and how we spend it, after all, but there are some general summer trends, and we want to invoke them here!
Create a Smell of Summer
The summer has a very distinctive smell to it, doesn’t it? After all, we associate good food and spritzy perfumes with the weather being sunny and bright outside, so why not think about incorporating that into your own home too?
One great way to do this is to light a candle in the evening time; it’s relaxing and a little bit cozy, and can ensure you’re feeling light hearted and surrounded by a good smell before bedtime. It can also feel a lot more personal to light up a candle in the room you’re in, ensuring it’s just for you, to bring back some good memories of summer’s past.
Otherwise, you can put air fresheners to good use all the way throughout your home. Pop them high up so the scent can disperse down and around throughout the room, or even get a socket attachment freshener, and plug them in in the morning and let the smell drift out towards the afternoon. This option is great for tackling the smell dirty pets can leave behind them!
You’ll want to focus on certain scents here, and ones that are usually associated with tropical paradises that we all want to visit at some point. Great examples include peach, passion fruit, or even an amalgamation of multiple scents known as ‘summer fruits’. But if you want to get a bit more diverse and/or specific with the scent you’re trying to create, make use of orange, pineapple, lemon, and blossom scented varieties.
Get Yourself Some House Plants
Whenever we see thriving greenery around us, we’re going to think of the summer time. That’s why it’s important to get as many house plants as you’re physically capable of taking care of, which is usually one per room in your house, and let them sit and grow and bring some nature into your home. Human beings can be very well benefitted from the presence of plants around them, so it’s a win-win in terms of aesthetics and practicality!
Make sure you know what houseplants are good for each room, first of all. For example, if you have a bathroom without a window, or there’s little to no natural light in there, you’re going to want a plant that can thrive in this kind of environment.
At the same time, in the bedroom, you’re going to want a plant that doesn’t switch up the way it makes food during the night time – some plants put out CO2 when the sun goes down, and you don’t want that around you when you’re fast asleep.
You may also want to invest in quite a few succulents. You can make a wonderful centerpiece terrarium out of these, or you could use them to decorate empty bookshelves or the top of the mantlepiece. And succulents don’t need as much attention either, and they’re cheap to buy, so they should probably be your first choice here!
Open Up Your Living Room with French Doors
They’re a dream addition for a lot of us – a good pair of french doors can look absolutely amazing, no matter what space they open into or out to. And not only do a pair of french doors look good, but they have some hidden benefits to them as well!
French doors are often considered a mark of architecture. When you have a set of french doors to accompany your space, you can really open it up – if there’s a patio outside, open the doors and you’ve essentially doubled the size of your living room. If you want your house to feel like summer, that means more BBQs can take place, as well as many more house parties and soirees, and the kids are always going to have space to run around in too. Plus, they can come in all kinds of colours and styles, so you’ll never be stuck with a pair of doors that just doesn’t fit your space at all.
One of the other main benefits is just how light and breezy they can make a space. A lot of light can be let into your living room, making it feel much bigger and a lot more like summer has come. Just pull back the curtains or the sash and let the outside weather in, in a much more controlled and refined way.
And seeing as they can replace windows altogether, and have a much bigger surface area, they can pull a lot more cool air from the breeze outside in when your house walls have been baking in the sun all day.
Make Good Use of Colourful Accents
Summer is all about colour – there’s a deep and/or bright blue in the sky, the clouds are stark white and fluffy, and there’s a lot of green in the trees and plenty of fruits hanging off the vines. There’s a lot of colour around you in summer, even if you’re used to it by now and no longer notice, and that’s something you’ll be wanting to recreate within your own home too.
So, make a good use of accents here. After all, you probably don’t want to go as far as wallpapering the entirety of your bedroom in another bright and rich colour, and having to repaint a feature wall in your living room can take a lot of time and energy. We want things to be simple, and to feel as easy as summer lovin’, so focus on the small things!
Some summer tinted flowers, deep in purples and blues and yellows, in front of a main window can do a lot for your perception of the world around you. A bright red vase in the corner of the kitchen counters, contrasting against your white or pale backsplash, could be a great way to introduce a more summer like theme into your home.
Create an Ocean Backdrop
The ocean is something we associate with summer, and we always have done. It’s why nautical themes are popular with summer villas in Greece or Spain, and it’s why kids love to go swimming when the sun is out and the water is cool and clear. Why not try to introduce a similar vibe to your home right now? If you’re someone who loves the water, this is definitely a theme for you.
Go bright with the blues and greens, and make sure there’s hints of white to offset it. Place jars of shells around your home, and even get an old (or painted to look old) ship wheel to hang on the wall somewhere. This’ll look great in the bedroom, especially if you’ve been meaning to set up a feature wall for some time now; this’ll get you easily started! You could even set out a nautical rug on the floor too, to dip your toes into when the ocean is too far away.
Does Your Home Feel Like a Summer Paradise?
If not, and if you really want it to, you now know what to do! Because summer can be a really lovely time of year, and a lot of us wish it always was the summer – there’s a lot of whimsical nostalgia associated with it, and the weather is the best you’ll ever experience in your life!
So, get to making some changes around your home, because they’re easier to carry out than you may have first thought. Make sure you’ve got plenty of light, and you can open the window to bird song and a lovely breeze; you want things to remain cool but sunny, and you want to feel like you’re in a haven of your own!
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