Engaging Your Senses Through Home Design

Humans use five basic senses to experience the world around us. The senses include sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. We use our senses everyday, but we often forget the importance of appealing to them when we decorate our homes. Most people focus on how their room looks, with no regards to the other four areas. If you want to create a truly fabulous room design, you should find ways to engage all five senses within your space.Sight is the most obvious of the senses at work in home design. Visual elements of design are extremely important. Sight is undoubtedly our most used sense. We use our sight in almost every basic activity we do from driving to working to surfing the internet. When you design your room, you can create visual appeal primarily through the use of color, shapes, and lines. Imagine a room that is designed with one color and one uniform shape and size. That space would be extremely boring, wouldn’t it? That is why designers choose colors that contrast to create stimulating visual effects. By using various lines and shapes within a room, you can also create visual interest that makes a room more inviting.You may wonder how exactly you could appeal to someone’s hearing through interior design. While television or music is the most frequent noise heard in a room, these are not the creative solutions that will make your room stand out among others. Think outside of electronics about natural sounds that you can incorporate in your room. Consider wind chimes, for example. You could hang them right outside a window to let the sound drift through the windows. If you live in a very windy area, you might be annoyed by constant chiming, but you could still hang chimes indoors and just give them a flick now and then. Small fountains also offer a soothing sound to any room. The constant trickling of a fountain will remind you of sitting outside by a bubbling creek, creating an instant calming sensory experience.Smell is another important aspect of our daily sensory experience and yet one we often ignore. When you incorporate smell into a room’s design, it’s easiest to combine smell and taste. Smells can actually stimulate our appetite. Most people love to walk into a home and smell freshly baked bread, or tonight’s dinner bubbling away on the stove. Many people remember their grandparents by the smell of apple pie or freshly baked cookies. You can incorporate this concept into your home without constantly running the stove if you are a little sneaky. Scented candles can be found in every scent imaginable. As the candles burn, your home can quickly begin to smell like a bakery. You could also place a bowl of fruit in a strategic location to evoke more sensory reactions. A large glass cylinder full of oranges and fresh mint leaves will look beautiful as a centerpiece on the dining room table. It will also send a delicious fresh fragrance floating through your home.Lastly, the sense of touch shouldn’t be overlooked in any room design. We often interpret the world through our fingertips and it’s important for our homes to be soft and comfortable. Fill your house with a variety of textures to delight your hands and feet. Texture can be incorporated through soft furniture and silky curtains. Crushed velvet and silk covered cushions, smooth steel surfaces, and grained wood will give your hands plenty to experience.The most effective way to use texture is on the floor. Everyone loves to sink their feet into a soft plush rug. Your feet have over seven thousand nerve endings so a soft rug can make the most profound impact on a person’s overall sensory experience. Choose a rug that is delightfully soft to create a maximum impact. Look for rugs in plush wool blends, hand tied varieties, or even sheepskin. Coordinate your rug to visually match or complement your other decorative choices and your room will be complete with design elements that appeal to all five senses.