6 Intuitive Healthy Home Designs to Encourage Wellness
What do a kitchen remodel, bathroom renovation and your home wellness have in common?
As it turns out, a lot! Your home and your health go hand in hand, and based on the way you design, renovate, or transform your living space, it can either hinder or enhance your wellbeing. Everything from the quality of materials you choose and the overall layout of your home to the flooring options, window design, and doors you install can play a major factor in your overall happiness and longevity.
We’ve compiled a list of six helpful tips to make sure that you design the safe, comfortable, and healthy home that you and your family deserve.
1. Convenient Kitchen Design
Since the kitchen is one of the most well-used and best-loved rooms in any home, we’ll start our list there.
Intuitively-designed kitchen spaces make it easy to prepare healthy meals, and encourage healthy eating. Often, due to size or kitchen remodel budget constraints, kitchens are cramped and poorly laid out which makes cooking difficult and enjoying the space impossible.
By adjusting the layout of your kitchen to include multiple work zones with plenty of counter space, you can make cooking easier and much less stressful. Ideally, you’ll have one food prep zone within reach of the stove or cooktop, and another with easy access to the sink. A double sink is always ideal for washing up if it’s within your budget but not a necessity. This gives the ability for multiple people to utilize the kitchen without constantly being in the other person’s way, but still makes collaboration effortless and natural.
2. Welcoming Window Design
The placement of windows around your home is often an afterthought, but is arguably one of the most important aspects of intuitive home design. Improperly placed windows can be detrimental to the overall flow of your home. Not only is window design important for letting in beautiful and soothing natural light, having the ability to open windows and breathe in fresh air is essential for optimal living.
You’ll need to think of your priorities to decide where you’d like windows to go.
Do you want to be awoken naturally with the sunlight in the morning? That means you’ll need an East-facing window in your bedroom, depending on where you’re based. Find out where the sun rises and ensure that your windows are positioned to welcome that morning glow.
Are you a plant parent who needs lots of windows to keep your plant babies happy? Making sure that you have ample window space for the health of your plants while still allowing an adequate amount of light into your home could be a large priority for you.
Is there a view outside of your home that you’d love to be able to see from the inside? Placing a window on that side of your home would be an excellent choice, both for your viewing pleasure and for the resale value of your home.
Take a look at the innovative window design services that Pathway Design and Construction offers to incorporate gorgeous and healthy natural light into your home environment.
3. Fresh Flooring Options
According to the EPA, the air quality inside of your home can be up to 2.5 times worse than it is outside. This statistic moves to 3.5 times worse if you have pets!
In order to keep your air as fresh, healthy, and impurity-free as possible, we recommend considering solid-surface flooring options for your home. Namely, solid or engineered hardwood.
It’s true that there are other options for solid-surface flooring, such as laminate or LVP, which can initially be more affordable. However, laminate flooring is often treated with formaldehyde and other chemicals in order to make it heartier and more resistant to water and scratching. LVP, or luxury vinyl plank flooring, is made of environmentally-harmful materials, such as non-degradable vinyl, which will end up in a landfill and remain there long after we’re gone.
Hardwood flooring not only looks gorgeous and can be refinished (making it a true lifetime floor!), but also does not absorb the same dust, pollen, pet dander, and other toxins that carpet does. Beautiful floors and better air quality are big wins in our book!
4. Efficient Entryways
We all know that wearing shoes inside our homes introduces an unnecessary amount of potentially-harmful bacteria into our environment. This means that your entryway is your first line of defense between germs and your healthy home.
Encouraging your family and your guests to remove their shoes before they come all the way into your home is the most effective way to keep the dirt, grime, and germs at bay.
Providing a welcoming entryway or mudroom with a place to sit down and remove shoes while also designating an area for shoes to be stored is an excellent use of space that doubles as a way to keep your home cleaner and healthier.
Pathway Design and Construction can help you incorporate an entryway into your home build or renovation plans using our creative universal design and home remodeling services!
5. Brilliant Bathroom Remodeling Ideas
An intuitive bathroom layout ensures that not only will your bathroom not pose a threat to your family, but that it also acts as a peaceful, clean, and sanitary place of relaxation.
Because wet feet, hard surfaces, and tripping hazards don’t mix well, bathrooms are known for their injury potential. Simple switches such as delegating enough space to make your bathroom larger, choosing zero-threshold showers, and installing grab bars if necessary make a huge difference when the time comes for a bathroom remodel.
Thinking about your bathroom layout early in your design process can ensure that you fit all the pieces that you want. You also will be able to utilize your space to make your bathroom more spa-like, with soaking tubs, beautiful tile, and even shelves for plants.
With this in mind, you have the power to turn a potentially boring or utilitarian space into your dream oasis.
6. Fulfilling Fitness
Last but certainly not least on our list is including a place for you and your family to incorporate movement into your home space. This could mean an entire room designated as a home gym, a glassed-in outdoor area with home gym equipment, or something much simpler such as an extended recreation or living room with a corner specifically for yoga or other floor exercises. Perhaps it’s a bedroom window nook, just big enough to fit your meditation and stretching mat perfectly.
Whichever way you choose to optimize your space, incorporating movement into your day is made easier by allowing your healthy home to play a part into your fitness routine. The healthiest families know that the more movement we include in our daily lives, the more fulfilled, energetic, and happy we are.
Stop thinking of your home as something you have to work around and start getting used to the idea that you can shape your home to support the life you’ve always wanted to live by planning ahead and incorporating small steps to make it work for you.
Embrace Your Wellness!
Of course, this list is non-exhaustive. There are countless ways, both subtle and creative, to encourage health and wellness in the design of your home. By looking at your design with a decision to prioritize your health and happiness, we think you’ll be surprised by the incredible ways you can make sure your home is a wellness paradise as long as you live there.
When you need help designing your dream home with beneficial health and wellness in mind, count on the experts at Pathway Design and Construction to give you the best advice, service, and homebuilding or design experience you’ll ever have.
Call today for a free consultation!
