Important things to consider when designing your forever home

If you aren't familiar with the term, a 'forever home' is one that you're hoping to live in for the rest of your life. This is something we hear often from many of our clients who are looking to build or renovate a space for the next chapter of their lives. They want the spaces to be functional and to reflect their personality, habits and preferences. Many of these clients are only in their 50s and 60s, and have decades ahead in their home. Something that's not as prevalent in their mind is how the spaces will hold up as they age and have different needs. This isn't about focusing on designing an 'accessible home', but it's about ensuring that decisions made now don't hinder your needs in the future.

Keep your spaces easy to use

Making a space more accessible doesn't only help you as you age, but also makes the spaces much easier to use now. As a starting point, consider how you move around your home, how easy things are to reach or turn on, and how comfortable it is to use furniture or joinery. Some of the things you might want to consider here are:

• Having a generous clearance around joinery, fixtures and fittings within your kitchen and bathrooms (this can help with mobility issues and also makes it easier to maintain and clean the spaces).

• The width of hallways and doorways, and the overall flow from room to room within the home.

• The heights of storage, ovens, niches, tapware, etc. to make them comfortable to use.

• Prioritising drawers over cupboards for any cabinetry, and adding pull-out shelves to corner cabinetry.

• Mixers and door levers are easier to use than hot & cold taps and door knobs.

• Frameless shower screens are easier to clean than framed or semi-frameless options.

• Avoiding steps into showers or in hallways - and considering how spaces will be used if you have more than one floor. Do you need to keep a bedroom on the ground floor?

• Asking your builder to add extra noggins within the wall around the shower, bath and toilet for any future grab rails.

Use lighting strategically

Our vision deteriorates as we age, which means how we light our spaces and how we use colour becomes even more important. I want to make clear that this does not mean you need to flood a home with downlights. Doing so can actually cause more glare and produce an uncomfortable clinical light not conducive to relaxing. If you do use downlights in your home, I would recommend thinking about where they are actually needed, and put them on a dimmer switch so you have more control over the brightness.

LED strips are also a great way to add more light where you need it. The underside of your overhead cupboards in your kitchen and laundry is an excellent example of improving lighting in a comfortable way. LED strips are also great for bathrooms, installed under shaving cabinets and vanities, and in robes. These can be connected to a sensor to create a great night light as well.

We now have general lighting (downlights) and task lighting (LED strips), but we still need one more layer. To make spaces more comfortable to use at night (and to help with our circadian rhythm and getting better sleep), we also need to add warmer lights at eye level. This could be wall lights, floor lamps or tables lamps.

Colour and contrast

Colour and contrast can be used to add personality and interest - and they can also be used strategically to help make spaces easier to navigate as you age. The idea is to avoid having items visually disappearing into their background, but that also doesn't mean everything has to be black and white. You can use a combination of softer tones against mid-tones, timbers and metals to create enough contrast whilst also creating a really beautiful space. Some examples of this that we already use in many of our designs are:

• Contrasting fittings and fixtures (showers, mixers, towel rails) against tiles.

• Contrasting door/cabinetry handles against the door/drawer.

• Different floor to wall tiles can help you to perceive the edges of the bathroom better with low vision.

• Contrasting joinery to benchtop colours, joinery to splashbacks, and/or joinery to the flooring.

• Different colours on stair treads vs risers (if painted), and handrail against the wall.

If you’re planning a major renovation and hoping this will be your forever home, we challenge you to think beyond what you need from it right now. And remember that designing for the future doesn't mean compromising the home you want today. In fact, many of the decisions that make a home easier to live in later, simply make it a better home to live in now too.

Thank you for taking the time to read our blog post. Have a wonderful week!

Nina xx