The space you are in can affect everything from your mood to your health. Space isn’t just where you are but also contribute to how you are and, in many senses, who you are. This is why curating your space, designing it to suit who you are as well as who you want to be is so important.
There are lots of well-known tropes that tell us how we should organize our living space. “A tidy home makes for a tidy mind.” You need “headspace” to operate at your peak. But what do these things mean on a practical level?
The idea of curating your space to create a place you want to be in is relatively new. As Marie Kondo would say, curating your space is about keeping the things that continue to bring you joy and dispatching everything else that is not practical. But while binning all the things you don’t need will certainly make your house feel more empty, you also need to think about how you are going to organize what is left.
Curation is always about selecting the right items and choosing how to display them. In a museum, a curator will choose the items that best suit the exhibit; in your house, you should choose the items that speak to your personality. This doesn’t mean that you should necessarily get rid of all your clutter; it means that you should find the best way to display each item so that it is organized, in its way.
So what about the things you need in your house but aren’t necessarily beautiful? Cables are particularly frustrating and while you can box them in, the tangle behind your TV is probably best color-coded using heat shrink tubing and then bound together. Putting smaller items of the same ilk into glass jars is another good idea and works brilliantly for bits and bobs like paper clips, pins and batteries.
Of course, not everything needs to be displayed. Smart storage solutions and hidden storage is always a good way to hide things you need but don’t want to look at all the time. Baskets are rapidly rising in popularity as a way to store spare blankets and cushions but you can also use boxes, jars (as above) and any number of other solutions. Trust the artist within when deciding which things to hide and which to display.
Displaying the things you want to see is where your curation techniques will really shine. There are lots of methods for arranging a bookcase in a pleasant way but the important thing is to find a sense of balance. Chaotic displays are cluttered, disorganized and unpleasant to look at, as we’ve said, you don’t need to get rid of your stuff to feel calmer, you just need to think about how it sits in its space.
When you curate your space, you take control of how it affects you and your mood. Think carefully about what you want to achieve as you organize. You can curate for a future you just as well as the present you.
