Aside from Cleaning Day or, more specifically, the day after when everything is perfect and a pleasure to look at, we don’t really spend time looking at our homes as if we are a visitor in a museum or flipping through a design magazine. We just go about the day and do what we normally do.

When I design, this is my starting point. What is it that you do, where in the home and how. If you pay attention to the habits you have, they will naturally shape the home you will enjoy. The idiosyncrasies of individual lifestyles will make a project a success.

And so I’ve invented the Home Pods. An abstract concept initially, they become very real mini-environments that have the distinguishing feature of a luxurious bespoke glove that fits your hand and your hand only. Everyone admires it, relates to it, enjoys it, yet you’re the only one that revels in it to the maximum. They all fantasize about squeezing in, but after all, it is your glass slipper.

When renovating, it is a common mistake – yet a natural impulse – to start by selecting the aesthetics and the fluff. As an example, take a kitchen renovation. The natural instinct is to first search for ‘the look’ and pick what it is you’re more likely to want from an aesthetic point of view. As impactful as that is, the aesthetics are unsuccessful if not anchored in your own kitchen habits and the style of your own home. This is so much more apparent in a partial renovation where you need to marry the spaces that you will not renovate with the ones that you do.

This also.. is the hardest part. That’s why an amateur designer would never quite get it to the level of a professional.

Over the twenty years of interior design practice, I’ve developed my own unique way of looking at how people live, of understanding their habits and of giving them the ease to comfortably choose what they want – with confidence.

The more you understand yourself and look at your habits and patterns of living, the better your home will be. While, of course, we share many of those patterns with our fellow humans, we do carve our own ways and in a home, we like things placed just so. The toaster in just a particular corner and relationship to the sink, the coffee pot at the right distance to the cups. Not on the right, always on the left – for me.

Get to know yourself first, and then you can make and enjoy your own great pod in your home. With that what you will find is that everything you do, will seem to be just a bit better, just a bit more pleasant, just a bit more rewarding. Would you not want that?

This article first appeared in My 2 cents on design
how to curate a better lifestyle through design
part of  WORK \\ a DOCHIA FOCUS monthly lifestyle series