Wanderlust within windows

A home does not have to be stationary. Here are three ways to incorporate your travel experiences into the design of your house.

NT Features

The restrictions that have come along with the pandemic have not only altered the travel scene across the globe dramatically, but they have also sparked an interest in rethinking the design of personal spaces, where people now have been inevitably made to spend more time.

“The world is a book, those who do not travel read only one page,” says a famous adage by St.Augustine. Travel makes us speechless with the effortless beauty we witness, the cultures we learn about and the differences we get to appreciate. While travel is transient, the design of a home’s interior is not.

One of the ways to get rid of the fleeting foray of travel is to incorporate it into our daily lives. Furniture and furnishings impose a certain sense of rigidity and permanence on the places we call home. One can create a space where they can travel right at their homes – that has the capacity to draw out beyond the four walls and transport you into the vastness of your memories or dreams of far-flung places. If you are an avid traveller, designing a home reflective of your wanderlust might be of utmost importance. It is probably the only way you could really feel at home. Otherwise too, incorporating your not often travel experiences into tiny corners around your home will be a fun exercise. Here are three ways you can incorporate travel into the design of your home.

Buy souvenirs

Who among us is not tempted to bring back a piece of the places we visit in the form of souvenirs? Design is also an act of storytelling. One must be enticed by the tale sharing potential of their escapades that resulted in them buying a green ceramic vase in Kodaikanal or carved wooden toys from Channapatna. Not only will your home narrate a story, these souvenirs placed across your home will help be a conversation starter among your guests.

Be inspired by nature

Buying is great, but sometimes the manner in which we infuse our travels into design involves no money at all, but rather relies on keeping an open eye and heart. Take the colour palette of landscape in the hills of Himachal teeming in flowering lavender under the sky for instance, or the gold-vermillion sunsets of Kanyakumari, or the spectrum of shades and designs set in the rust-colored forts of Jaipur. The earth beckons us to borrow ideas from its basket. Such places can serve as the muse for dreaming up a colour scheme and sites for historical importance help structure design.

Let your nose be the guide

It is shortsighted to think of design as an entity only enjoyed by the eye. Indeed, good design considers all five senses. Pay attention to the smells of a place while you travel— incense in a chapel, irises in a valley, spices in a market—and allow that to shape your selection of scents for a space based on the mood you wish to evoke or the place you wish to transport yourself or your guests. And of course, unabashedly steal scent ideas from hotels as well. Many hotels have signature scent available for purchase or they can direct you to the source of their riveting fragrances.