"Lived-In" Homes Are Trending
Apparently, "Lived-In" Homes Are Trending
Finally.
Apparently, lived-in homes are having a moment.
When I first started seeing this trend, my reaction was basically: Finally.
I've never been drawn to homes that are so perfectly decorated that you're afraid to sit down. You know the ones. Every pillow is perfectly placed, every surface is completely empty, and somehow there's never a coffee cup sitting where it doesn't belong.
They're beautiful! But sometimes they remind me a little too much of a hospital.
Give me a home with some history instead.
When I picture my perfect bedroom, there's a well-loved handmade quilt folded across the foot of the bed and warm sunlight streaming through the window.
In the living room, there are family photographs everywhere—on the walls, the tables and the fireplace mantel. The frames are quaint, collected over time, and don't quite match, and the furniture is much the same.
Some pieces are newer, and others are worn around the edges because they've been loved for years or passed from one generation to another.
Nothing is messy but nothing is precious either, and that's what "lived-in" means to me.
I Want My Home to Feel Like Coming Home
If I had to describe the feeling I'm trying to create in my home, it wouldn't be farmhouse, cottage, traditional or any other decorating style.
I'd say this: I want people to feel like they've just gotten home after a long road trip.
You know that feeling: You've been gone for days. You're tired, you've spent hours in the car or navigating airports. Then you finally open your own front door, you drop your bags, your shoulders come down, and you think, Ahhh. I'm home.
That's how I want people to feel when they walk into my house—even if they've never been there before.
Maybe that's why the lived-in trend appeals to me so much. It reminds me less of a professionally decorated house and more of a cozy little B&B tucked away somewhere in the mountains.
Warm, comfortable, a little imperfect and full of stories.
You Can't Manufacture a Story
One of my favorite things in my kitchen is an old handmade wooden piece that my husband bought for me as a surprise about 15 years ago.
We found out that it originally came from an old Virginia farm.
The story we were told was that a young woodworker made it as a wedding gift for his new bride. It stayed in their kitchen for 57 years, until they both passed away within months of each other.
Just one look at it and you can tell it was used.
The wood is worn. The little doors aren't perfectly uniform. "BREAD," "TATERS" and "ONIONS" are written right into the wood kind of off-centered from one another.
It isn't perfect and I wouldn't want it to be.
Someone made that piece for the person he loved, and she used it in their kitchen for more than half a century.
Then, many years later, the man I love walked into an antiques shop, saw it, thought of me, and sent it to me as a surprise.
You can't order that history from a furniture catalog.
And now we're adding our own years to its story.
Does That Mean You Can't Buy the Look?
Of course not.
If you find a beautiful new piece of furniture that gives you that old-world, lived-in feeling and you love it, by all means buy it. There are some gorgeous pieces being made today, and not everyone has inherited furniture sitting in the attic waiting to be discovered.
But I don't think you need to spend $300 on a "distressed heirloom side table" just because someone has decided that lived-in homes are fashionable now.
People - especially in rural areas and in the mountains - have been creating homes this way forever.
We thrift, we refinish, we trade things with neighbors.
We take the dresser Aunt Whoever doesn't have room for anymore.
We rescue something that's been sitting in someone's garage for ten years and say, "I could do something with that."
And sometimes we simply inherit things as we go through life.
Eventually, you look around and realize your house is full of pieces that came from all sorts of places.
And somehow they work together because the thing they have in common is you.
A Lived-In Home Uses All the Senses
There's another part of creating a lived-in home that I don't think gets talked about enough.
How it smells.
My dream cozy mountain B&B doesn't smell like "nothing", it smells warm. I love citrus mixed with spice. Apple pie. Pear tarts. Those fragrances that make you wonder whether someone has something delicious baking in the kitchen.
Fragrance is one of the easiest ways I know to create that sense of warmth without buying another thing for the house.
Change the wax. Light a candle. Put something comforting in the warmer.
Suddenly the room feels different.
That's one reason home fragrance has always been about more than simply "making the house smell good" for me.
It's part of the atmosphere.
Maybe "Lived-In" Isn't Really a Trend
Trends come and go.
Next year, someone will probably tell us that something else is the new way our houses are supposed to look.
But I'm not sure lived-in homes ever really went anywhere.
Maybe we're simply getting tired of trying to make our real homes look like reels of homes where nobody seems to actually live. I don't want a house where someone is afraid to put their feet up - I want quilts that get used, furniture with stories. I want family photos everywhere, and in mismatched frames. Give me sunlight through the windows, something warm and spicy filling the air, and probably a coffee cup sitting somewhere it technically doesn't belong.
If that's what's trending now, I'm already there.
From My Coffee Cup ☕
I've been thinking about that old kitchen piece while writing this.
When it was made, its first owners couldn't possibly have known that more than half a century later it would end up in an antiques shop—or that another husband would buy it for another woman he loved.
That's the kind of thing I want my home filled with.
Not necessarily antiques, but definitely stories.
Because someday, the things we're using and loving right now will be old too, and maybe that's what makes a home feel lived in.
It isn't something you decorate all at once, it's something you build, collect, inherit and love over a lifetime.
XO,
Jen
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I'd love to help you create a home that's warm, welcoming, and uniquely yours. Explore more articles in At Home with Jen, or if you're looking for the perfect fragrance, I'm always happy to help.
