Out of all the ways COVID-19 has impacted our lives (let’s be honest – pretty much entirely for the worst), one of the most surprising ways is how it’s affected home design.
As we all seek to find ways to keep ourselves and our loved ones safe, this desire for safety has started to be reflected in how we layout and design our homes. One of the best ways to keep your family safe from COVID-19 is to prevent potentially exposed people and objects from coming into the house where it can spread to others, and proper home design is a convenient way to keep these things isolated and reduce your risk of exposure.
Here’s a few of the biggest design trends we’ve seen in a post-pandemic landscape, and how they can keep your family safe going forward:
Home Design Trends Post COVID
Home Offices
Some of us spent a good part of this year working from home, some of us are still working from home, some of us never got the chance to. Whatever your work situation may be right now, home offices are going to be crucial going forward in case something like this ever happens again.
Ideally, your home will have an area you can turn into a home office, but if not, you still have options. The important thing is to carve out a space where you can use dedicated home office furniture to stay on task and create a better sense of “work” than you might have just setting a laptop up at the kitchen table. By focusing on and designating these spaces, your home office will be even more productive than it was the last time you needed it – let’s just hope you don’t need it anytime soon!
Increased Privacy
The coronavirus meant most of us were going to be home more often one way or another, and that meant an awful lot of us were tending to…mingle our spaces together. Going forward, as the need to stay home for safety remains an issue, homes in the future will offer greater space definition and division between areas to promote privacy. Particularly in kid’s rooms, everyone needs their own space sometimes, even if it just means getting to close the door and read quietly for a while.
Sterile Entryways
We’ve covered mudrooms after COVID 19 before, but the importance of an organized entryway during and after the pandemic can’t be overstated. Set up plenty of entryway organization so your family can leave things like outerwear and shoes that have been exposed to potential contaminants (or that just got plain dirty) in a safe area, away from the rest of the house, where they can get cleaned off safely.
Sterile Materials
While doctors are still studying exactly how long COVID-19 can live on many surfaces, a lot of materials such as metal are known to be antibacterial and can help curb the spread of germs if used more often throughout your home. Even a minor change like swapping some of your existing shelves for wire shelves can help your home stay more germ-free than ever before.
Organization & Calm
Finally, if there’s one thing we can all agree on during the pandemic, it’s that it got awfully…stressful. While we all have different ways of handling stress and disarray, a clean and decluttered home can go a long way towards helping you feel more relaxed and comfortable in your own space. Going forward, homes will likely put a stronger emphasis on using home storage furniture to help reduce visible clutter and keep you feeling that much more relaxed at home.
If any of these sound like they may be applicable to your home or living situation, you might just find them coming in handy as the days go by.