3 Nature-Inspired Home Refreshes, From An Interior Designer

These days, home isn’t just where the heart is. For many people, it’s where the gym, restaurant, bar, café, and vacation is too.

After months playing so many different roles, your space might be starting to feel a bit stale and snug, like a sweater you’ve outgrown. Instead of tossing it out and starting fresh, interior designer and author of Where Spirit Meets Space, Kelly Robinson recommends doing a gentle mending.

Previously a workspace designer for major tech companies like Airbnb, SoundCloud, and Headspace, Robinson has shifted to more household-facing work since the pandemic began. “It’s been quite a homecoming, no pun intended,” she tells mbg over—what else?—a Zoom call. “The design brief of what our homes need to be for us changed overnight.”

In the parallel universe we’re all living in, Robinson says it’s more important than ever to fuse our inner space with our outer world. “I really see a kind of trinity between our body, our home, and our planet, and all of these three things are containers. The more that we are aligning the container of our home with the container of the natural world, the better we’re going to feel within it,” she explains.

So, what does that look like in practice? Here, Robinson shares three ways to refresh your quarantine hideaway to help it take on some of the expansive, colorful, and restorative energy of the outdoors.