EP80 How Our Home’s Layout Affects How We Feel

Layout is more than just where walls go,  it’s how your home feels to live in every day.

In this episode, I’m talking about all the the subtle but powerful ways layout shapes our mood, stress levels, and how easily (or not) our lives flow through our homes.

I chat about why bad circulation quietly causes daily frustration. How thresholds and transitions create calm and clarity. Why adding a pause point or two in your home design can encourage those small moments of stillness we all crave for.

And one of my favourites - how to design your layout for better human connection.

Because our homes just simply work better when we consider and plan for human needs, like connection, ease, flow, and how we want to feel when we open that front door after a really long day.

*******************

Hi, I’m Tash South — interior designer, renovation consultant, and founder of South Place Studio.

In this podcast, I share practical renovation advice, along with deeper insights into home and belonging.

If you’d like more resources and support, head to:
https://www.southplacestudio.com/freebies

If you’re navigating your own renovation, my RenoVersity programme offers a structured, guided and thoughtful approach to renovating with clarity, confidence and intention https://www.southplacestudio.com/renoversity

Or if you want to get social, you can find us here:
Instagram: @southplacestudio 
Linked In: https://www.linkedin.com/company/south-place-studio
Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.co.uk/southplacestudio

Transcript

Welcome And Why Layout Matters

Tash South 0:00

Hi everybody! Hi my lovely renovators! I hope you are doing really well today. I am back this week with really one of my most favourite things to not only talk about but also to do. I love designing home layouts, and today I want to talk about how our homes layout affects how we feel every day within our homes. I think this is so important. It's where I start with almost every single project is with a layout. I grab a floor plan and I get going, and I can go for hours figuring out how to best use that space in a way that is going to make the person who lives in that space feel like it is easy, just feel like they can easily move through and they can get through all of their daily tasks and everything they need to do within their home without effort. So it just feels natural, it just feels normal, it doesn't feel like a chore. So I'd love to talk to you about that today. I'm going to just cover a few points, so let's get into the episode. Okay, so I want to take a bit of a deeper look at how circulation and thresholds and transitions and pause points really influence how we move around and use our homes, and also how they influence our stress levels and our well-being, and also our connection within the home with the others we live in the home with, we use the home with, and really, this all goes beyond square footage and resale value. It's all about how to best plan your home and design your home for that ease. And actually, I do find that a well-designed home on with a layout that's been thought through, it will be worth more. People will notice that it's designed well and that they can carry out their daily tasks and their daily lives more easily if the layout is good. So it actually does have that advantage as well. But I want to talk about today how that really affects us as humans within our space. So, firstly, I want to talk about circulation. So, circulation, I think, you know, before when houses were built, and even now to a certain extent, when new houses are built, circulation is not really taken into consideration enough. I find that, you know, older houses, Victorian houses, like here in London, most of the properties are of older stock, Victorian, Edwardian, and so on. And sometimes those houses in their original forms can be quite awkward to live in. Narrow hallways, kitchens at the back, or bathrooms at the back, and how we move through the space has not really been considered. And obviously that's why people renovate so much these older homes, because once they live in them, they discover that they're not really conducive to good circulation and ease within their own homes. So circulation, it's really how we move through the space. How we quite often, if you have to double back, if you're crossing paths with anyone in pathways or any circulation space, is it awkward? Is it easy? How many obstacles do you have to navigate? Is there a wall maybe where it it shouldn't be, or a doorway where it shouldn't be? It's all about whether movement and the paths through your home from one area to another, it's whether they feel natural or whether they just feel awkward and wrong. So little clues that your circulation might be wrong. And usually I find that if you notice that you're frustrated within your home trying to do things, that is a major sign that your circulation is not good within your home. But you know, if you're sidestepping furniture, or there's not natural places for things, or your doorways are perhaps not in the places that they should be, or you're walking through another room to get into a different space where you might be interrupting someone else. Are you finding your daily routines frustrating or are you finding them efficient? All of the answers to these is going to give you a clue that your circulation is not good. It causes this kind of invisible stress that I think sometimes people don't even realise, and we're just walking through it every day, getting frustrated, not realizing sometimes how those kind of micro frictions are really getting to a point where they make us feel really unhappy with our homes and not feeling like it's a place where you can relax or be calm, and so that's why I think circulation is so important because when it's wrong, it's causing you all of these little micro problems, these little micro frictions throughout the day, the whole time you're in your home, and then you get really frustrated with it. And so I think if you're thinking about renovating, or perhaps you are not even having to renovate completely, perhaps you can improve your circulation by making smaller changes into your home, like opening up a wall or moving a doorway, so smaller projects. There are lots of ways you can improve circulation within your home without having to do a major renovation. So I want to give you a few quick points on how you can improve circulation in your home. So if you're having that frustration and you're finding you're not able to move through your home quite easily, what you need to consider when you're renovating is to have clear pathways from one room to the next. And it always helps if pathways are lined up, if doorways are lined up, if that is possible from one room to the next. And also where they connect logically, having the kitchen and the dining room connect, having the kitchen and the living space connect, having clear pathways and connections between those spaces, considering open plan or broken plan so that that circulation can be improved, having fewer unnecessary crossings, so that is also helped by having doorways aligned, so not coming in one room on a doorway on the right hand side and then having to cross over that room and go into another room through the doorway on the left hand side. So little things like that, thinking about your floor plan at design stage and looking at how a human is going to move through that space and looking at how you can make it as easy as possible for a human to move through the space and to be able to do the tasks that they need to do quickly and easily, and then that links on to movement patterns. So think about how you are currently using your space, think about your routine every single morning. So obviously, we wake up in our bedrooms, then we generally go to the kitchen area for coffee, for breakfast, and then we go to the bathroom, perhaps get ready for work. So think about those actual movements, even go to the extent of drawing those movements onto your floor plan and making sure that you were getting the flow right and having those clear paths and thinking about how you use your space and how you can improve the layout for your own activities. And then you can even take this even more granular into room by room, especially in the kitchen. I spent hours and hours thinking about kitchen designs, where everything is placed. Think about how you cook a meal. Where do you go first? Where do you reach naturally for the dishes, for the pots and pans, for your ingredients, for your utensils? Think about it all and how you move your body within your kitchen to prepare a meal. Because the more you make that easy, the more you will enjoy using your space, and it will just be calmer and more relaxing and not be so stressful and frustrating to use your home if you've thought about these things before. So you can think about it from a larger perspective in terms of the layout of your entire home, and you can also think about it at a smaller perspective in terms of room-by-room design and how you use that particular room. And so, circulation in both of these ways is so important to get right. Next, let's talk about thresholds and transitions, because these are really important as well. And I find that having a home that transitions well from one space to another also helps with that feeling of calmness, of cohesiveness. And for me, I think the most important transition is actually when you're stepping in from outside, when you're stepping into your front door, so that first entranceway, the first hallway that you have. For me, that's a really important transition that I always try and get right for my clients and for myself as well. It has to be a place that's welcoming, that's calm. And of course, what I was talking about in terms of making a space calm is storage, making sure there's a place where everything can be put away so you're not greeted immediately with lots of visual clutter as soon as you step into your home. Because that is certainly not a great transition to have to step in from the outside world and then suddenly be greeted with more chaos and more clutter. And so it's really important for me in any hallway, no matter how small it is, to find a way to include a space to put shoes, to put bags, um, to have some hooks for coats, because you could you usually come in with so many things and you immediately need somewhere to put those things, but if your hallway is already crowded, it j it just adds to those little micro stresses of the day. And I find that even if you do have a small home and a small hallway, if you can find a space just perhaps in the next room, perhaps there's space in your living room or in your kitchen where you can have some storage for these items, just really helps because then you can keep your hallway clear, but you can have a dedicated space somewhere not too far away from the door and the hallway where you can just offload all of these things and suddenly feel calm as you transition from outside to inside your home. Because really, I feel I definitely do, you just want to decompress when you step into your home from being out and about, and you want to just mentally arrive and be calm when you enter your home. And so that's why I find that a defined entranceway and an organized hallway is so important for this. So that's to do with hallways, but throughout your home you'll have different transitions, you'll have the transition from your hallway into your kitchen or the hallway into the living room. And there are so many ways you can create these transitions, almost too much to talk about in this episode, but a transition can be a design element, it can be a feeling of cohesiveness. Perhaps you find it calming if you walk from your hallway into the living room and it has the same sense of organization, sense of style, colour, texture. So it can be a transition in a stylistic way, but it can also be a transition in a practical way. So there are many sorts of transitions, but what you do want is for that transition to feel natural, and perhaps you want a transition from your hallway into your living room, for example, to feel the same. You want it to feel relaxing, welcoming, and that can be done in terms of design, that can be done in terms of materials, but perhaps you want a transition in a different way, in a in a psychological way, where you're transitioning from one mode to another. Perhaps you're going from work mode to home mode. So those transitions can be achieved with things like zoning. Zoning is so great for transitioning because you can zone a certain area in so many ways. It could be a different type of flooring, it could be a different kind of lighting. There are so many different ways to zone so that you feel the change, you feel that transition from going from one mode in your life where you have to change into another. So perhaps there are ways that you can make that transition a bit easier. Perhaps there's a zone where you take your laptop and your work and you just put it away for the evening, you put it somewhere else so it's not on the kitchen island. Then you can focus on the next mode, which is mum mode or cooking mode. So I think these transitions and thresholds really make a difference to also how we use our space and thinking about how we will do use our space back to the first point within the layout, and thinking about how we move through the space, how we use the space, and then planning from there when it comes to your renovation. I think preparing in that way and planning in that way is really going to help you have smoother transitions and thresholds throughout your home. And then the next one I want to talk about is pause points. So these little pause points, they're little areas that you can plan for in your home when you're thinking about renovating or when you're planning for a renovation. And I love including these little pause points within a layout design because it just makes you look at the space from a bird's eye view and thinking about little pockets of space, little places that you can picture yourself throughout your day just pausing for a minute. I think it really helps with layout to not only for circulation but also for how we enjoy our homes in a more relaxed state to have these small areas. Perhaps you've even just got one in your entire home that is a little pause point for you. And these can be little places like planning enough space to have a chair by a window so you can sit there and read. Planning to have a recess on a window deep enough to be able to put a built-in window seat, and then also practically once the home is finished, it's avoiding overfilling the rooms with too much furniture. It's about ha leaving space to pause and enjoy your home. And also it creates visual breathing space, so not overcrowding your home with narrow hallways and narrow pathways and too much furniture. It's thinking about extending it, that feeling of spaciousness, the feeling of breathing space, which just adds to our kind of mental enjoyment and relaxation within the home. It's almost kind of just space to be still for a moment in your home. And I do find that you know modern layouts they will squeeze every inch out of their home for function. And your home does have to be functional. I speak about that all the time on the podcast. But you also have to leave space for pause and space for your mind to just have a moment where you can sit for a minute and read a book and have a coffee because we're we're constantly on the move in this modern day. We are multitasking and our nervous systems never fully settle. So I always find having these little moments within a home really helps with that, and more and more I'm starting to design these little spaces into homes. In my own home, I have a landing by a big window, and I've always had a chair there. Now, admittedly, I don't always have time to sit in that chair, but I have on occasion, especially in the summer, when the sun goes over the house at around about 5:30, 6 in the evening, and the light streams into that particular window, and it is just the most gorgeous place to sit for a moment on those rare days where I have a moment and I'll take a magazine or I'll take a book and I'll just sit there even for five or ten minutes, enjoy the warmth of the sun, and just take a minute to just regulate or transition. And so I feel like we must include these spaces in our homes. It might even just be one small area, like I said, but it really helps us regulate, it helps us just slow down for a minute and just have a little rest between tasks, between you know, all the responsibilities that we have in our lives. And finally, I want to talk about layout for connection. Oh, this is my favourite thing when I'm designing a layout for a client. I of course I ask them loads of questions before we start the project about their life, about what they like doing, do they entertain, do they like to have people over for dinner? How many people do they like to have over for dinner? At the best party or the best dinner party, what would be the dream amount of people they could see at the dinner table? And I start there and then start planning for their lives within the layout. And so it's really one of my favourite things to do is to imagine my client living there once I know quite a lot about them, how they will be using the space, and then to at the end of the project leave them with something that is going to make their lives and their home lives just so much more enjoyable than it was before we first met. So that is one of my most favourite things to do. And I also loved planning this within my own house as well when we built it, because I love to have lots of people over in my home for meals, for parties, and I really enjoyed planning the space for that to happen. And it is something you need to think about at the very start of your project at layout stage, and it all does start with human relationships. And many people at me and I include myself in this as well, we always think about open plan living to promise that connection. And yes, it does work. I have a big open plan space at my home, it's kitchen, dining, and living all in one, and sometimes it works beautifully, but the total openness can sometimes amplify noise, it can remove some privacy, especially now. Our kids are getting a bit older, and they perhaps want to go off and be somewhere else with their friends, or they want to be in the living room and we're in the dining room, and you can hear everything going across the two spaces. Um, so that can be tricky, and I would say if I was doing it again, I would plan more for broken plan, which I which we can still do. You can still add doors between the spaces or some sort of division which would help without separation, but then still be able to have it open when you do want that connection. So I would just urge you to think ahead always about how the people are going to use the space and plan for future. Plan for when the kids are older, add those those doors that can be left open or closed for that. The option, the broken plan living. I think thinking about that in advance is is a really good thing to do. And then also obviously will save you work further down the line and save money further down the line because once you discover that it's not quite working for you, you won't have to do that work and spend that money because you you've already thought about how the home will need to be used, you thought about the future and how that future might change the use of your home. So I do think that having a layout that really contributes to the best connection within your home, it's it falls between the two. It falls between open plan living and also privacy. Because before our homes used to be quite constricted, we'd have a separate little room for everything, and that didn't work for us to connect either. And so it's finding that balance between the two that's going to work for how you want to live in your home and how you want to connect with the others in your home as well, and it really is that balance of finding where you connect, where you're going to spend the most time, and how you can connect in those spaces. A little thing I absolutely love to do that I always think is great for connection in a home is whether a kitchen is open plan or not, I always have a space to sit in the kitchen. So I'll always have a couple of comfy chairs, or perhaps it's even just a stool at a countertop. I think when you're the cook in your family and when you're entertaining, it just is so lovely to have someone in there with you, and they can sit down, they can enjoy their drink or their glass of wine while you're cooking, and you can both chat and you can catch up whilst maybe other guests are elsewhere in the home. So you're not feeling completely isolated in the kitchen. There's a space to connect in there, and it's such a small thing, it's just thinking ahead of planning for a space and not covering all the walls with cabinets, having a little spot where there's somewhere to sit in the kitchen to create that little opportunity for connection. So there are many ways you can optimize for connection in your home. If it's open plan and you want to have the option of having more intimate spaces, you can consider partial walls, you can consider glass doors, zoning, glass partitions. There are ways you can create the feeling of openness, but still have the option of privacy when you need it. And then something I think that is part of connection as well is sight lines, which I talk about quite a lot, also. It's being able to see from one space into the next. So even though you might not be able to speak to that person because they're not immediately within your space, but if you can see into the next room and you can still be connected by sightline, that really adds for the connection as well, and it also adds to that feeling of the home being open and not closed off and restricted. So there's there's quite a lot to this connection topic, which I would like to cover again in another episode. But I think for today we've covered quite a lot in terms of layout and how that affects how we use our home. And so I will end the episode here, everybody. I really hope it was helpful to you. I hope you can steal some ideas of how to improve your layout and bring that connection into your home if you are thinking about renovating soon. If it's been helpful, drop me a little email or send me a review or a message, whatever you might be watching or listening. I read every single one of them and I will come back to you. And if you need any help, drop me a line as well. But that's it for this week, everybody. I hope you enjoyed it and I look forward to the next episode. Bye for now.