As one who has been traveling for as long as I have been alive (and this is no exaggeration), designing a home reflective of my wanderlust was of utmost importance to me. It is the only way I could feel at home. Here are five ways I have incorporated travel into the design of my home.
Buy Souvenirs
This one is as obvious as it gets. Who amongst us isn’t tempted to bring back a piece of the places we visit in the form of souvenirs? And because I like to think of design as an act of storytelling, I am always enticed by the tale-sharing potential of my escapades lugging mineral green ceramics from Tamegroute or buying an agate chess board from a roadside stall high up in the Atlas Mountains: Not only will my home tell a story, but I’ll have stories to tell to boot! And yet, we are often encumbered by how to physically transport bulkier travel finds. I tend not to let airline luggage allowance be the limiting factor in my purchases overseas: Instead I look to services like Luggage Forward, a brilliant company that will ship your luggage from your doorstep to your destination at competitive rates. By thoughtfully bringing physical elements of your travels into your home, you create a space that is eclectic and rich in varied visual languages.
Preserve Your Mementos as Art
The word souvenir is a loan word from the French verb that translates to “to remember” in English. And while souvenirs can be bought, there may be other tangible manifestations of our trips that aren’t directly purchased with the intention of serving as a memento, but can just as well be built into the design of a space. One of my most prized pieces of “art,” as an opera aficionada, is the program from the production of Gaetano Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor that I attended at Milan’s famed Teatro alla Scala. Sure, the opera ticket was not free, but the program came along with the price of admission, and simply framing it with Framebridge resulted in an intriguing piece of art-cum-conversation-starter for my home. Maps, menus, even the branded brown paper from the obscure Roman grocery store Volpetti have been turned, at one point or the other, into art for my home.
Be Inspired by Nature
Buying is great, but sometimes the manner in which we infuse our travels into design involves no money at all, but rather relies on our keeping an open eye and heart. After all, edifying travel is, at its core, a question of concentration; of listening intently to the music of a place to ascertain what exactly about it incites in you the feeling that it does. Inspiration is free! And with imagination, you can take that inspiration from the world and into your home. Take the color palette of landscape in Provence teeming in flowering lavender under an azure sky for instance, or the gold-vermillion sunsets of the Serengeti, or the variegated spectrum of shades set in the rust-colored hills of the Rainbow Valley in Chile’s Atacama Desert: the earth beckons to us to borrow ideas from its bounty. Such otherworldly places can serve as the muse for dreaming up not only the color scheme but also color proportionality of a room. When I was creating moodboards for the design of my studio apartment along with my design partner, we included photographs of landscapes I’d been moved by to help—well—color our choices.
Let Your Nose Be Your Guide
It is shortsighted to think of design as an entity only enjoyed by the eye. Indeed, good design considers all five (or six, if you are so inclined) senses, including that of the olfactory. Three-dimensionality in design means not only appealing to the visual or tactile consciousness, but creating an all-encompassing experience. Pay attention to the smells of a place while you travel—incense in a chapel, irises in a valley, spices in a market—and allow that to shape your selection of scents for a space based on the mood you wish to evoke or the place you wish to transport yourself or your guests. And of course, unabashedly steal scent ideas (not things!) from hotels as well. Many hotels have signature scents available for purchase (a favorite of mine is that of JK Place in Capri) or they can direct you to the source of their riveting fragrances. When staying at JK Place in Rome, I was entranced by the whiff of amber that greeted me as I walked into my impeccably designed room. I asked the reception and found that those warm notes were the product of Florentine perfumer Dr. Vranjes and that the shop was just around the corner from the hotel. This new information led me on a little excursion, pounding cobblestone pavement, to discover this color-filled emporium of scents at Via Vittoria 63 in the Eternal City. My stay in Roma could not be eternal, but at least a transportive scent from it would not only enrich my home, but also enriched my trip for the experience of chasing after it.
Pay Attention and Learn Something New
Pay attention to the design lexicon of the places you visit. How does Danish design achieve austerity and hygge—a quality of coziness and conviviality—all at once? What can be gleaned from the bold manner in which the Senegalese use color in their traditional fashion, or the general opulent maximalism of India? On a macro scale, simply being a present and mindful traveler allows you to pick up interesting and different points of view with which to suffuse the design of your home. And, beyond the abstract, paying attention is key because it also allows you to discover brands that may otherwise not have been within your field of vision. You may not be able to carry back a chandelier from your visit to Copenhagen, but by keeping your eyes peeled and doing your research, you may discover a new brand or maker, like I did the lighting design brand Nuura, from whom I ended up getting an inflorescent chandelier online. We live in a global village where so much more than what is in our immediate sphere is available via the internet (or even better, via local stockists). Merely keeping an eye out for foreign brands allows you to bring international design into your space without necessarily having to carry it back with you, resulting in a home design that is hyper individualized and uncommon.
