How to Personalize Your Space

Hundreds of design enthusiasts tuned in to hear three highly regarded designers—Vern Yip, Leah Alexander, and Laura Muller—share their thoughts at a Cambria Style interior design webinar about How to Personalize Your Space. A lot of ground was covered during this engaging and informative event and you can watch and enjoy the entire conversation to gain all of the insights. Here are the three top takeaways from this event for your next design project.

Take a Vacation at Home

According to Vern Yip, award-winning designer, host of several memorable HGTV series, and New York Times best-selling author of Vacation at Home, a primary way to personalize a space is to incorporate his “vacation at home” philosophy. He says, “For me, something really important to put out there is this idea that you shouldn’t be waiting for those two weeks out of every year that you get to maybe enjoy a restful retreat somewhere. You are your home’s most important guest, and when you walk through that front door, your home should be servicing you. It should be rejuvenating you, renewing you, giving you the rest that you need.”

Yip expands on this principle by saying, “You should really only have two kinds of things in your home—things that you absolutely need and things that you absolutely love—instead of just trying to manage stuff all the time.”

Beyond that, Yip wants people to feel freer by incorporating materials that we now have at our fingertips to make our lives easier. For example, LED bulbs have eliminated the need to come home and replace light bulbs. Performance fabrics mean that you actually can have white sofas and not worry about pets, kids, or spills. Performance is also one of the things Yip absolutely loves about Cambria quartz surfaces.

“Cambria has such a wide breadth of beautiful designs. But the flip side of that is the performance aspect. The fact that it’s scratch resistant, antimicrobial, and that you don’t have to be precious with it,” says Yip. “I think that that’s really important, especially in a kitchen that really gets used. I think once you can relax and just really enjoy your space, that’s when the vacation at home begins.”

Wouldn’t It Be Cool If … ?

HGTV’s Designer of the Year Leah Alexander of Beauty Is Abundant likes to ask, “Wouldn’t it be cool if … ?” as a way to prompt clients to consider unusual design ideas and see what they can come up with together to really personalize a space. She notes that it’s okay to dream but encourages lovers of vibrant color to design in ways that will help them stay in love with bold color choices over time. This is achieved through careful color selection, contrasting elements, and something to create balance.

In the kitchen above that has a lot of visual interest, Alexander was drawn to Cambria’s Brittanicca Warm quartz design. “When there are a lot of things happening, you could go with a solid white countertop,” says Alexander. But Brittanicca Warm adds another layer of interest without being over the top in spaces that already pack a punch with color.

Alexander brought her “Wouldn’t it be cool if … ?” philosophy to a Kips Bay Decorator Show House Dallas bathroom to create a memorably interesting and ethereal experience that was also saturated in color. Again, her choice of Cambria quartz surfaces provided subtle visual and textural elements that balance the bold color. She says the debossed vein in the Inverness Bronze vanity also added an elegant metallic quality similar to the wallpaper. “You’re just kind of getting this reflectivity everywhere you look. “It’s just kind of like a glimmer here, a glimmer there, a star here, a vein there.”

When asked about one of Cambria’s newer quartz designs, Annaleigh, Alexander pondered “Wouldn’t it be cool if it were paired with a terracotta color in a space, maybe even some brass just to punch up that color and really lean into its incredible, soothing design?” We do think that would be cool.

What Does Wellness Mean to You?

Four Point Design Build principal and founder Laura Muller likes to drill down on what wellness means to her clients because wellness has come to be such a big umbrella term. What she’s learned is that people often view wellness as how to reduce stress and how to have fewer things to worry about.

Muller has also worked with many families with children who have certain sensitivities as well as couples with extreme height differences or work schedules. She is careful to design spaces in ways that don’t trigger conflict but sustain healthy rhythms and lifestyles.

For example, a particularly tall client found pendant lights over kitchen islands to interrupt his sight line which was a distraction. Muller says, “The eyes are windows to our souls. They’re also windows to our neurological systems which can create a lot of stress and anxiety, but you’re not really sure why. So, reducing that stress can involve understanding the sight lines, the color tones that we pick, the ease of which the path of travel is—is everything functioning together properly?”

Muller designed the family’s kitchen with alternate lighting options and points out that everything you see “being done” doesn’t always need to be done. You can truly personalize spaces that make you feel well. The same family also has dogs that were always rubbing against the kitchen island. So she selected a waterfall countertop edge to avoid the need to repeatedly repaint the ends of the cabinets.

These are life issues, wellness issues, that are in turn design issues—everything from sight lines to finishes, maintenance, and budget. When you’re investing in your home, it’s important to consider if your design choices are creating stress or alleviating stress. Muller wants people to feel less stress, and to be well in their spaces. That seems like a pretty great takeaway.