Design Recipes: Hygge for the Holidays

Design Recipes: Hygge for the Holidays
While you can incorporate hygge into your home and lifestyle throughout the year, the holiday season is certainly the perfect time. Maya Kruchankova/Dreamstime/TNS
Tribune News Service
Updated:
By Cathy Hobbs From Tribune News Service

By now you have probably heard of hygge, the Danish term for coziness and contentment. While you can incorporate the concept into your home and lifestyle throughout the year, the holiday season is certainly the perfect time.

Looking for ways to welcome a sense of hygge this holiday season? Begin by evaluating your whole home, then look for ways to uplift each space using these tips.

Infuse Scents

In nature, each season brings a fresh fragrance and overall scents. Fragrance can also help provide a sense of calm. Consider infusing winter scents into your home over the holiday season such as juniper, fig, pine and sage.

Create Cozy Areas

Make spaces in your home that can be used as places for you and your holiday guests to refresh, recharge and renew.

Find a Focal Point

Even if you don’t have a fireplace for everyone to gather around, you can still rearrange your space in order to create a central area that can serve as the hub of holiday activity. Go big with creating a cozy room, or simply setting an attractive communal table.

Incorporate Nature

Natural elements such as wood can help warm a space.

Play Music

Find calming and soothing music or sounds like water, bells or chimes.

Provide Comfort

From welcoming your guests with their own cozy throw to providing individual slippers, providing comfort is the cornerstone of hygge.

Use Greenery

Evergreens and winter-hardy plants and trees not only help add freshness to a space, but will also help improve overall indoor air quality.

Change Your Color Scheme

Adding earth tones goes a long way to adding warmth and hygge to a space. Consider warm shades of brown, green, yellow and red.

Open the Windows

Natural light not only impacts moods and helps enhance lives but improves a sense of hygge. With the sun setting earlier during winter months, you can also achieve holiday hygge by adding festive elements like string lights and candles.

The Danish are considered to be among the happiest people in the world. Why not use some of these tips to create a sense of well-being and calm into your home this holiday season?

Cathy Hobbs, based in New York City, is an Emmy Award-winning television host and a nationally known interior design home staging expert and short-term rental/vacation home designer with offices in New York City and The Hudson Valley. Contact her at [email protected] or visit her website at cathyhobbs.com.
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