How to Make Your Home the Right Place for You, According to Bobby Berk

The interior design expert from Queer Eye explores how design can transform your mental wellness in his new book, Right at Home.

For Bobby Berk, interior design isn’t about curating an aesthetic. It’s not about having the prettiest, cleanest, or most luxurious home. And it’s not about what looks best to anyone but you. For the design expert and Queer Eye star, interior design is solely about the way your space makes you feel.

An Emmy-nominated TV show host, Berk also runs his own design firm and has curated a line of home decor, selling wallpaper, rugs, art, and more. This month, he’s breaking into the publishing world, too, with Right at Home: How Good Design Is Good for the Mind, an interior design book that’s so much more than your average coffee table read. Available starting September 12, Right at Home is all about bettering your mental wellness with the art of interior design.

“Often in those books, every picture is so manicured, and so edited and so perfect—no one actually lives like that,” Berk tells Better Homes & Gardens. “You see that and you start to feel like your space is inferior. I wanted to create a book that would help people make their spaces perfect for them and help them know that their spaces can be perfect just the way they are, with a few little edits.”

Right at Home delves into the ways that interior design can be a form of self care. With chapters on color, light, plants, and attention to sensory details, the book makes designing your home interactive, introspective, and truly fun. It asks, “What makes you happy?” and really means it, prompting readers to look inward in order to create a space that’s safe and comforting at the end of a long day.

“If you don’t plug your phone in at night, or if that cord has a short in it, your phone’s not going to get fully charged. And what’s going to happen? It’s not going to make it through the day,” says Berk. “Your home should be your phone charger—it’s what’s recharging you.”

At the end of the day, function is key to creating and maintaining a home that’ll keep you happy in the long-run. Whichever room in your home needs a touch-up (or if the whole thing could use a second look), Right at Home has got you covered; each chapter includes a room guide, including one that details how you can make your kitchen work like a sous-chef and another that debuts Berk’s “New Living Room Manifesto.”

Related: How to Craft a Better-for-You Home, According to Designer Anita Yokota

Center the Things You Love

The most important part of making yourself “right at home” is filling your space with the things that make you happy. Quoting Sheryl Crow, Berk says, “If it makes you happy, it can’t be that bad.” Luckily for those of us on a budget, embracing this mindset doesn’t have to mean going out and buying something new. Oftentimes, you already have these items, but just aren’t featuring them prominently in your home.

“It can literally be a rock that you found on the beach on your favorite vacation, or a rock from the lake you grew up on,” says Berk. “When you look at it, it fills those emotions and it wipes the slate clean of all the stress that you accumulated throughout the day outside of the home. That’s what your home should be about.”

Berk’s extensive experience designing other people’s homes over the years has allowed him to move away from prescribed design methods, and more toward asking clients (also called “heroes” on Queer Eye) what gets them excited.

“A lot of things in the book actually aren’t about design—they’re about figuring out what your favorite things are outside of design. Those are the things that make you happy,” says Berk. “I’ve learned throughout the years to not ask potential clients or heroes from the show what their design aesthetic is. I’ve learned to get them to answer what makes them tick. What’s their favorite sweater? What’s their dream vacation? What’s their favorite show? Things like that really make them think about the things that make them happy.”

Make Your Lighting Work for You

To Berk, your home’s lighting doesn’t just encompass whether you’ve picked task lighting or overhead, or whether your windows face east or west. Instead, as the title of chapter six of Right at Home says, “lighting is everything” to the designer. Not just important for illuminating spaces in your room, Berk says that the way your home is lit can impact key aspects of your wellbeing. One prominent example? Your sleep.

When the lights dim, your body starts producing melatonin, a chemical that puts you straight to sleep. By turning down the lights slightly in the evening, you’re able to give your body a natural, healthy signal that it’s time to start getting ready for bed.

Berk says that oftentimes lighting is overlooked by people who are looking to improve their wellbeing at home—it’s easy to let it fade into the background. But being intentional about where, how, and how intensely your home is lit can make an unbelievable difference. He says that a quick fix, as simple as installing dimmer switches, helps a ton.

“A lot of people don’t think about putting dimmers in the home, or if they don’t have dimmers, at least some lamps that have low wattage bulbs,” says Berk. “I’ve had to put dimmers in pretty much the homes of every client we’ve ever worked with outside of the show because they're just like, ‘Oh, the lights are just on or they’re off,’ and I’m like, ‘No, there are so many levels to lighting.’”

If you’ve tried dimming the lights, and you still can’t relax, try tuning into your other senses. For example, Berk says his mom’s happy place is the beach. He decided to get her a sleep machine and set it to play beach sounds, and says she’s sleeping so much better. Whether it’s a certain scent, sound, or taste you love, integrating it into your home is the Right at Home way.

Related: 15 Easy Ideas for Better Lighting

Tackle the Clutter

It’s a tried and true tip, but Right at Home takes it to the next level—decluttering your home is one of the best things you can do for a settled mind. And, according to Berk, it’s important to start just when the clutter starts to build, as waiting even a day or two can allow the mess to build and build.

“When it comes to organization, a lot of times people let it get out of control—it starts off small with a little disorganization here, and a little there,” says Berk. “And before you know it, it’s taken over your whole space, and then you just kind of live with it.”

According to Berk, getting rid of clutter is all about living in the present. It’s easy to get nostalgic or hold onto items you think you might need in the future, but Berk suggests that (with some exceptions) you discard what isn’t serving you in the here and now.

“Is it important to you in the present? Is it making your life better in the present?” asks Berk. “Or is it just something that you feel, emotionally, you need to hold on to? If it’s not fulfilling a need and making your life better in the present, get rid of it.”

Related: How 2 Pros Say to Deal With Sentimental Items While Decluttering

Color Should Equal Calm

The impact that color can have on a space—and on your mental health—cannot be understated, says Berk. Instead of searching for the trendiest paint color, or scouring design guides for the classiest shade of muted gray, seek out colors that make you feel at peace. If a color or design doesn’t make you feel your best self, move on.

“When I was five or six, my mom had my bedroom decorated in all red—red curtains, red bedspread,” says Berk. “I just knew that didn't make me feel good. I didn’t know why. I was a little kid in Missouri, and I had no idea what was going on. But I just knew it didn’t make me feel good. So I saved up my birthday money and I went out and I got a blue bedspread and blue curtains, just because I knew that blue made me feel better.”

If you’re not as quick to discover which colors work for you as Berk was, Right at Home features your new best friend—chapter five, titled “The Language of Color.” This section of the book contains what Berk describes as an “instruction manual” on deciding how colors make you feel and which shades work best for you. The in-depth guide features a separate page for each color, and teaches you how to use color strategically—beyond your room’s four walls—in your own home.

Where Should You Start?

If you’re not quite sure where to start, Right at Home has so many sources of inspiration, crafted for the purpose of getting you involved. It includes workbook-style pages that prompt you to participate in the process of sprucing up your home in a way that works for you: You’re the lead designer in the Right at Home world.

But if you just can’t wait until you get a copy in your hands to get a jump on improving your home, Berk says that there’s a simple (and super important) place to begin: organization.

“That is always the number one place you should start in your home, because it's hard to start anew when you're still dealing with the old and the clutter,” says Berk. “It really ties back to your mental health. And start small—if you try to take on too much, you will automatically procrastinate and you will not even start, or you will start and it’ll be overwhelming.”

Keeping your home tidy may not seem like it matters much—it’s just a pile of laundry in the corner or a cluttered desk, after all. But Berk says that tackling these small tasks can go so far as making us more productive at work the next day.

“I don’t think we think about things like making our bed and getting rid of that pile of laundry as  helping us with our job performance at work, but it does. When you make that bed every morning, you’re releasing endorphins. Like, ‘I just accomplished a goal I set out to accomplish.’ Even though it’s a tiny little goal—we don’t even think of making our bed a goal, but it is.”

These little wins can take you such a long way, but unfortunately the opposite is also true. By getting ahead of the minor inconveniences and sources of stress, starting at home, you’ll be set to live a calmer, more manageable life.

“On the opposite end, as you’re walking out the door in the morning and you see that bed, you’re like, ‘I didn’t make the bed.’ Your mind is already programmed that you failed,” says Berk. “Really think about the things in your home and setting yourself up for success or failure outside of the home and how little things in your house can have a huge impact on life outside of your home.”

Right at Home is heartfelt and thoughtful, and Berk has already seen its impacts in his own life. One section of the book delves into dealing with grief and learning how to organize your space to honor people that you’ve lost while protecting your mental space. Berk tells BHG that he lost his father in August, and when he brought a finished copy of Right at Home to his mother shortly after, she said it seemed as if he had written that section just for her.

“I was very happy to see that that page was already helping somebody, especially somebody so close to home,” he says.

Right at Home: How Good Design Is Good for the Mind by Bobby Berk is available for purchase online and in stores now.

For more Better Homes & Gardens news, make sure to sign up for our newsletter!

Read the original article on Better Homes & Gardens.