Welcome Home: Why Your Entry Sets the Tone

for everything beyond it...

I hate to sound judge-y or snobby, because no one wants a friend like that, but with 20 years behind me in the design industry I have a confession to make. I can tell how someone lives by the first one‐meter square of floor inside their front door.

Not by the type of flooring or whether the console table is vintage or IKEA, but by the conversation that a space starts the second you cross the line between street and home.

Think about the threshold you crossed today for just a sec. Keys in one hand, phone in the other, tote sliding off your shoulder. Maybe you tossed your keys in a bowl, added your coat to the collection of 7 others building up on a hook, and tossed your bag on a bank. I’m guessing you flung off your shoes as your phone rang, forgetting to put them on the shoe rack behind the door, as you hurried off to the kitchen to grab something to drink, phone set to speaker.

For most of us, the entry is an after-thought: a strip of tile that catches dirt, a hook that can’t keep up with the weight of so many jackets and bags, a pile of mail that accumulates faster than goals on January 1st.

Truth is, to me at least, a threshold is more than a landing spot, it’s a nervous system cue. Within two seconds your body registers whether you’re still on alert or free to drop the invisible armor you’ve worn all day out there in the world.

I learned this about a decade ago, with my bare bones white entry room which is about 19 m2 with nearly 4 m2 ceilings. It’s big, yes, but it has 6 rooms off of it, so there are doors on every wall. There is not a lot of wall space. We moved in when I was pregnant, my son arrived 5 weeks later, so decorating the entry wasn’t high on my priority list. I had two things in the room - a big white Knoll Saarinen tulip table in the center, with a large flower arrangement at all times (sometimes just branches in a pot, or a mini Christmas tree during the holidays), and along one wall, a giant radiator that took up over half of the entire (and only) free wall space that I had. I put a wooden gray cabinet near the radiator to hold shoes. Other than that, there was no where to put anything except the white round table in the center.

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Here is what it looked like. And this was how I lived for the first 12 months in this place. And yes, I’m a designer and best-selling interiors author. WHAT A SHAM (ha ha)…