With Christmas just around the corner, you might be thinking about making your space as appealing as possible for your family, friends and other guests. At Willow & Hall, we have looked beyond the clichés and into how scents, music, colour, food and drink all contribute to creating the perfect home your guests won’t want to leave!
SCENT
Christmas is a sensory time, with the scents of cinnamon, clover, smouldering wood, and mulled wine filling our homes. So, how can scent make your house feel more homely this Christmas?
Choosing specific scents can put you and your guests into a more positive and relaxed state of mind. The idea that scents can influence our moods comes from Aromatherapy; a phenomenon adopted by many leading hotels across the world to define their unique scent that reflects how they want their guests to feel.
Although we're accustomed to the scents within our own home, our visitors aren't. So, we better get it right! According to aromatherapy specialists, essential oils and scents provoke certain moods. Depending on the scents you enjoy, here is a list of the effects they can have:
Lavender makes us sleepier but also creates feelings of trust and improves our memory. And, it is also said to evoke a state of openness and trust in people, likely to make conversation more fun!
Sandalwood increases confidence and reduces stress
Bergamot is especially good for removing odour caused by tobacco and promotes positive feelings
Ylang-ylang encourages mental alertness – great if you’re planning to have a healthy debate. Introducing ylang-ylang into your dining area should help inspire interesting conversation.
MUSIC
It’ll be no surprise that music influences the mood of any gathering. And, it turns out that certain music can help us enjoy food more. Research from Oxford University has found that music can help accentuate the taste of certain food. So, if you’re serving a traditional Christmas pudding, for example, you might want to play some deep choral music in the background to help balance the bitterness of the pudding with the powerful sweetness of the brandy butter. Spotify has a wide selection of playlists for "dinner" in their Mood & Genres section which transition seamlessly with no interruptions.
COLOUR
Sometimes referred to as ‘Colour psychology’, the colour scheme in your home reflects you and the mood you want to create. And, it's also applied in some of the great hotels of the world. So, here's some of the most popular colours, and the mood they're said to evoke.
Blue
Promotes calm, which is why it’s a useful colour choice for bedrooms. For a more relaxing vibe in communal areas like living rooms, choose warm and bright blue tones.
Red
Choose if you’re trying to create excitement, stimulate healthy debates and make a memorable impression. The effects of red are more positive in lamplight as opposed to daylight. A room heavy in the colour red has been known to evoke feelings of love and warmth.
Yellow
Best suited if you're looking to spread joy and happiness. It also evokes a sense of freshness because of its association with citrus fruits and springtime flowers.
Green
Promotes calmness and togetherness. It relieves stress and makes us feel comfortable enough to be ourselves. Green evokes similar feelings of organic freshness to yellow.
Neutrals (brown, grey, white and black)
Neutral colours are good for the most prominent aspects of your surroundings, but can also can be complemented with your choice of brighter colours. For example, you could style one of our neutral coloured sofas (e.g.The Appledoe Sofa Bed in grey) with some bright blue scatter cushions. On its own, white demonstrates purity, light brown feels homely, dark brown is associated with richness, black with mystery and grey with reliability.
So, depending on the room in the house, you might want to think about the type of mood you want to create. Perhaps a bright conservatory can have accents of green and yellow, and the cosy living room can be punctuated with blues and reds. Using neutrals really helps to accent those colours and ties the colour scheme of the room together making it a more appealing space to spend time in.
FOOD
There’s no denying that food is one of the main components of Christmas. Warming winter roasts, delicious cheeses, and perhaps an indulgent Christmas pudding! Foods have a profound influence on our mood and can really encourage feelings of happiness in your guests. The key indicators tend to be around temperature and colour.
Serve warm drinks to spread the love
A study titled ‘Experiencing physical warmth promotes interpersonal warmth’ revealed that “participants who briefly held a cup of hot coffee versus iced coffee judged a person as having a ‘warmer’ personality. So, serve a hot cup of mulled wine upon arrival.
Dishes for a better mood
Nutrients have an affect on how we feel and fortunately some of these are nutrients can be found in our favourite festive dishes.
Chromium (found in potatoes, sweet potato and turkey breast): works to regulate mood and plays a vital part in increasing serotonin, norepinephrine and melatonin levels in the brain
Folate (found in Brussels Sprouts, asparagus): commonly used in treating depression. It supports serotonin regulation and helps our brain in a variety of functions, such as detecting mood and regulating subsequent social behaviour.
Creating the perfect home for your guests can really be as simple as putting on some vocal music and introducing a lovely scent into the air. But, if you want to take things a stage further, you can help create a pleasant atmosphere by cooking a certain meal or adding splashes of colour into any rooms you want to make fresher, cosier, or calmer. We know that every household’s Christmas is unique, but so is your home. Why not try and incorporate these elements into your home to create a space that your guests will love.