Rental Interior Design Tips That Make a Property Feel More Like Home
There's a weird kind of feeling disconnected from space. It doesn't matter if the rental home has the perfect furnishings or if the walls have been freshly painted. A sense of unease in a home can leave one feeling like a visitor in someone else's home, and that can be very problematic. Research on environmental psychology has provided lots of evidence that our surroundings and our sense of psychological safety and belonging are heavily impacted.
Even when a renter leaves, all of the furniture goes with them. This can leave a space that is perfectly adequate in terms of square footage and even comfortable in terms of the quality of the finishes, but that feels soulless in some way. That feeling of a lack of soul in a rental space can be mitigated entirely if the renter has taken the time to make the space their own. To make a space feel more like home, a renter can take advantage of the many design options available to him or her to create a space that feels personal and comfortable.
Why "Home" Is a Feeling, Not a Deed
There are three main feelings that get registered in our brains of individuals when a space is home-like: feeling of familiarity, feeling of control, and feeling of sensory comfort. Until recently environmental psychologists started studying a phenomenon of home attachment. Homes are not just physical places of residence anymore. These are the symbols of our identity. Thus, they can evoke strong feelings and powerful attachment, which may even override the desire for material wealth.
The fact that a space is familiar can evoke pleasant feelings and even strong emotional attachments. This is because familiarity lets individuals feel safe. Even places that have not been visited for a long time can evoke lots of warm and positive memories, and sometimes even feel like home. Home is the place where individuals can be themselves without fear of judgment by others. For this reason, the feeling of control over a living space is another very important component of a home attachment.
This is why a hotel room with really nice furniture can still feel really cold, whereas a really modestly furnished apartment that is just full of personal touches can feel really warm and homey. The brain doesn't register these physical attributes of a space in the same way that it registers the thread count of a hotel bed, for instance. It registers whether or not the space feels homey, and whether or not it feels homey is based on whether or not the space feels familiar, whether or not the space feels like you can control it, and whether or not the space provides you with a lot of sensory comfort.
Knowing this changes how we approach rental design. Instead of asking "what can I add?" ask "what would make this space feel like mine?"
Start With Scent and Sound
Of the many aspects of interior design that are used to create a space that is welcoming and supportive to its inhabitants, the two least utilized are scent and sound. Both of these invisible to the naked eye, scent and sound bypass the brain's analytical processes and are received by the nervous system and go straight to the brain's emotional center, the limbic system. This is why when we smell a particular scent, it immediately evokes memories of times past and can even make us feel as though we are in a completely different location, even if we are physically in the same space. The smell of a candle, for example, can immediately make an unfamiliar space feel warm and welcoming.
Before moving any furniture or buying any decor, consider:
Introduce a constant signature scent within the rental via candles, diffusers or linen sprays.
There's nothing better than having a small Bluetooth speaker that you can take with you from room to room and place in order to add some ambient music in the apartment or simply some white noise in order to block out any unpleasant outside noises.
The texture of soft furnishings can help to muffle sound within a room. Throw blankets, pillow covers, furnishings and rugs all help to layer a space with texture and visual interest and can help to reduce the feel of emptiness in a room.
Soft furnishings reduce the visual complexity of a space so greatly that even just a few pieces can produce the best results in terms of increasing the sense of contact in a rental. In fact, the best way of adding some contact to your rental is through Soft Furnishings above all else as these greatly increase the sense of comfort and 'warmth' through touch and in this respect help to greatly create the perception of 'residential-ness' that ultimately relates to satisfaction.
Use Textiles to Claim the Space
Furniture is out of your hands when you are renting a property, so to speak. This means that you have to stick with the landlord's sofa, the bed frame, the dining table etc. However, this is where the large variety of soft furnishings comes into play. Throw blankets, pillow covers, curtains, rugs for the floors as well as for the areas where you place your furniture, all of these can be easily brought along to your new rental property and can be used to create a warm and inviting space very quickly. They are soft furnishings that can be easily removed from a space without a trace and are just waiting to be used to give a room some personality.
Research from the University of Texas at Austin on residential satisfaction noted that soft furnishings in the home added to the perception of warmth and gave a sense of residential satisfaction and that this had a considerable impact upon people's perceptions of their home. The research found that it wasn't the perceived quality of the space that added to a perception of warmth but rather the degree to which the space contained soft residential furnishings or 'residuals'.
As previously noted, these residuals are temporary and easily moveable furnishings which people bring into their homes from day to day. They also noted that the residential interiors that were perceived as the warmest contained the greatest degree of residual or soft furnishings. As previously noted these residuals serve to contain visual noise in a space, add color and pattern and also can alter the temperature of a space or perceived temperature.
Swap out the builder-grade curtains for ones that have some texture to them, or more weight to them. Cover up the neutral-colored comforter with a duvet of your choice. Even throw a rug down on the floor under the dining room table, even if the rest of the floor is fine. These types of layers can help to signify that a space is yours, even when it is just a rental. For more ideas on how color, pattern, and texture come together in real spaces, browsing a portfolio of completed interiors can spark useful direction.
Set Up Areas of Activity that Actually Match Your Own Habits
Don't fall into the common trap of treating the floor plan of a rental as fixed, by arranging the furniture in the 'logical' way that it was left by the previous tenant. Treat the space as if it were your own and arrange the furniture so that it functions in the way that is most conducive to your own particular behaviors and needs. For example, even in a small space you may find that you spend a lot of time reading, and thus would benefit from a small reading nook with a light and a pile of books.
Design your space based on how you intend to use your space and the way that you actually live. This means having zones for different activities like reading, relaxing, making coffee, or spending time with others. A corner or nook of your space with a reading light and a basket full of books can be a real homey spot. Having a cozy nook can be far more impactful to your sense of home than a perfectly styled piece of furniture that you never use.
The way a space is arranged can have a major impact on how people feel living there. Thoughtful design is particularly valuable in rental homes, helping renters feel more settled and connected to their surroundings.
Creating zones of activity gives you scope to design each area to suit you best, even when the main features of the room (the furniture) are non-negotiable. This also means that you can create a space of 'downtime' (relaxation), or where you can read, or where you can enjoy your morning coffee, in order to make best use of the space available to you.
The Psychology of Personal Objects
Research published through the American Psychological Association states that people have a strong sense of control over objects that they know were previously lived with. This sense of environmental control is known as environmental self-regulation, and it plays a significant role in how we perceive spaces around us. When we bring personal objects into a rental home, these objects become psychological anchors, meaning that they are a physical representation of your personal space and a reminder that you are the homeowner of that space.
Photos, books and personal items work as amazing psychological anchors and help to calm our nervous system in spaces where we do not live. Most of the renters and guests of shared properties hold onto boxes of photos, books and other personal items thinking that after they settle into a space they will unpack these objects. The problem is that these items bring the renters the opposite effect of what they are hoping for: a sense of anxiety and discomfort of being a stranger in a foreign space. If you want to calm your nervous system in a space and get a sense of belonging and comfort then bring the photos, books and personal items into the space first before you even begin to organize the space or set up your furnishings and other items.
Lighting Is Almost Always the Problem
You say you feel that your place is somewhat cold or 'less than homey'? The culprit could well be your lighting. More often than not the main issue with lighting in rental properties is the amount of overhead lighting, and generally this is quite diffuse and focused from above. This type of lighting creates flat, unforgiving conditions and will struggle to produce any sense of warmth or coziness. It does not usually make for the most 'like home' atmosphere.
The fix is layering, and it doesn't require any permanent changes:
Add floor lamps to corners to create warm pools of light at eye level
Use table lamps on side tables and dressers to diversify light sources
Switch bulbs to warm-toned options (2700K-3000K range) wherever possible.
Use candlelight in the evening, even briefly, to transition the room's atmosphere.
The Illuminating Engineering Society, a non-profit that serves the worldwide community of lighting design professionals, has known for decades that by using vertical illumination and by using multiple light sources to create depth in a space that it can be warmed up and made to feel more to give the impression of more space than a single overhead light could provide. And in a rental, vertical illumination and the use of multiple light sources to create depth and give the space warmth can be achieved with the use of plug-in fixtures.
The Space Will Follow Your Lead
But by far the most important principle to keep in mind when designing a rental space is commitment. The space will follow your lead, and make you feel at home if you treat it like home and make deliberate, thoughtful choices about how to spend time there and how to arrange the objects in it.
You don't need permission to feel at home. You need intention.
