Cozy Apartment Goals: How to Make Your Apartment a Holistically Cozy Retreat
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Are you yearning for a cozy apartment that boosts your mood and makes you feel at home? Well, here’s something you might not have considered: looks aren’t everything when it comes to creating a cozy space!
True coziness comes alive when we use ALL 5 of our senses - not just sight. Touch, smell, sound, and taste can also factor in to your cozy decorating if you want to create a holistically cozy environment in your small apartment.
So in this post, I’m walking you through each of the 5 senses and explaining exactly how you can use them to create your cozy dream apartment! Let’s use the power of coziness to make your rental apartment feel like YOUR cozy home. 🥰
Would you rather watch than read? Here’s the video! ↓
1. Creating coziness through touch
This one is pretty easy to apply to cozy decor. If you want a space to feel cozy, then it only makes sense to include lots of nice soft, lush, cozy fabrics. And although this might seem like a given (because of course you want soft things in your apartment) it is actually very commonly overlooked when shopping.
I am guilty of this mistake. I am guilty of buying things that might have looked really good, but in terms of the sense of touch, they were… disappointing.
So for example, there’s the couch that I've had ever since I first moved into my studio apartment. Even though I am very happy with this couch overall (I really would recommend it to anyone), the one thing that has always bothered me about it is its texture is actually quite rough. It's this kind of rough tweed fabric. And as someone who pretty much never wears pants in my apartment, it’s actually very irritating on my bare legs.
So if you want a dream cozy apartment, really think about the fabrics that you're purchasing and how it's gonna feel to interact with them every single day.
Also, if, if you're familiar with my videos, you know I'm a big proponent of layering tons and tons of decorative pillows, as far as looks go. But think about actually laying on those pillows, you know?
For example, that gray pillow in the center of the photo below is pretty much like hugging a porcupine. It is not a cozy pillow. I do like having it there because I simply like how it looks, so it's the age old choice of looks versus feels. And in this case, I'm choosing looks because I never actually lay on my bed during the day; only at night when I take all my decorative pillows off anyway.
These are just the things to consider when it comes to texture, even right down to the fabric you choose for your outfits that you wear around your apartment. Because it stands to reason that the clothes that you put on as you exist in this apartment are perfect opportunity to create a sense of coziness, as well as decor.
For me, it's baggy band tees. That's my go-to cozy, makes-me-feel-happy-and cute kind of look.
You are the most important part of your space, so adorn yourself in textures that feel lovely to touch and make you feel good. You are just as deserving as being decorated as your apartment is.
Seriously, don't underestimate the power of touch when it comes to creating a cozy atmosphere!
2. Creating coziness through smell
Your sense of smell plays a huge role in how cozy your space feels.
This is where you can incorporate scented candles, room sprays, and perfume. Yes, it doesn’t have to just be home fragrance! If you spray yourself with a perfume that you love, then you’ll walking around your apartment with that scent. And like I said, you are the most important part of your space. So you can smell good in combination with your scented candles. (As long as you’re not super sensitive to fragrance, that is! I personally enjoy an aggressive onslaught of fragrance throughout my day, haha.)
When it comes to home fragrance, think about how you can incorporate your favorite scents into your space. Go shopping for candles, find a good room spray. I personally love Diptyque’s room sprays, especially their Orange Blossom and their Baies scents. In particular, I love to spritz a lovely room spray on my sheets before I go to bed, which makes my bedtime experience immediately feel blissfully cozy.
And in addition to candles and reed diffusers, you can get fresh flowers or dried flowers. I've also heard of people hanging eucalyptus in their showers, making it so the steam releases the scent of the eucalyptus and makes your shower experience incredible.
Even just the act of baking (which is an activity I admittedly do not partake in ever, haha) can fill your apartment with a wonderful, wholesome, fresh baked smell. So enjoying your sense of smell isn’t limited to purchasing fragrances, it can be the simple act of making something lovely in your kitchen then enjoying the natural scent of it.
Another thing to consider: they say that your sense of smell is the strongest sense in correlation to memory. And when you're spending time in your apartment every day, you're creating memories for yourself. You’re weaving a tapestry of events that you are going to look back on in the future, and one of the things that will be very strongly tied to those memories is the array of scents that you used at that time.
So be sure to keep in mind how much of an impact your sense of smell can have on the cozy experience of your apartment!
3. Creating coziness through sound
Imagine yourself curled up on your couch in your apartment. You're surrounded by the soft fabrics and the fragrance of a lit scented candle on your coffee table. And to add to the cozy sensory experience, you also have some really chill, relaxing lo-fi music playing. To me, relaxing music is such an important piece to the cozy puzzle!
And I think this is actually commonly overlooked; the role that music and sound can play in the overall experience of your apartment. We tend to get so wrapped up in the way our apartments look and smell (buying decor and scented candles is pretty much interior styling 101), and it’s easy to forget about how sound can affect our mood and the overall comfort of our spaces.
So when you're cozied up in your apartment, really think about the soothing music or relaxing background sounds can you can put on. Really think about how you can sonically cozy up your space.
If you're at all curious about the music that fills the atmosphere of my apartment, or if you're just not really sure where to start in terms of finding some really nice relaxing music that won't steal too much of your focus if you work at home, I have a few YouTube playlists I’ve put together that I personally listen to all the time. This could be a good place to start!
And it doesn’t even only have to be music; nature sounds or ambient noise can be very soothing as well. I personally love the sound of rain, so sometimes I use this app called Rain Rain to relax to the blissful sound of rain falling.
Basically, it’s about finding the sounds and music that get your mind and your apartment to a comfy place!
4. Creating coziness through taste
This one might be the most abstract in relation to creating a cozy atmosphere in your space because it's a bit of a one-and-done experience. Sadly, eating a wonderful meal only takes about 20 minutes or so, so it’s not something you can continuously experience in your apartment.
I personally wish I was in a perpetual state of eating a wonderful meal at all times, but alas, I am cursed with the limitations of a human stomach. Nonetheless, let's talk about how taste can inform the coziness of your space!
So of course you always want to be eating well in your apartment, having yummy snacks and drinks always stocked in the kitchen. But in terms of using taste to help you create that cozy atmosphere in your space, you can think about the marriage of the sense of taste to the sense of sight.
What I mean by this is to think about how you can visually heighten your experience of eating and drinking.
For example, your can drink your coffee out of a cute mug that you love, where every time you look at it you feel cozy and happy. You can also choose plates that are visually appealing to you and think about your table presentation, if you have a table. A lot of us small apartment dwellers do not have space for a table, myself included, but if you are lucky enough to have a table, then think about your tablescape. How can you decorate your table so that when you're sitting down to eat, it's a visually beautiful experience as well as a delicious one?
So when it comes to creating that dreamy, cozy experience in your apartment, think about not only what you eat, but how you eat it. What do you drink from, what do you eat off of, and how can you make those things enhance the experience of eating?
5. Creating coziness through sight
Now it’s time for the obvious one! Of course sight plays a main role in the cast of cozy characters in an apartment. And I'm not going really go too in depth in this one because sight is what we generally think of when decorating, and that’s what most of my videos and posts are all about. I’ve covered this territory at length, haha. At this point I have over 100 videos about the very visual act decorating.
But in the context of this specific post, I would like you to shift your mindset a little bit when it comes to the visual nature of decorating.
I personally like to think of cozy decorating from a fully human place, not just a purely materialistic place. It's not just about what we buy for our apartments. That's a big part of it, of course, but it's not all of it. Keep in mind that decorating, even though it's inherently visual, can actually be quite a bit deeper than that.
I would argue that the most visually beautiful spaces actively have the other senses in mind, which adds to their beauty. You may not visually see it, but you can feel it on some level. That's when a space has soul.
So that's how I like to think about creating a cozy space; engaging all of the senses - not just sight - and creating an entire holistic, cozy experience in your apartment so that ultimately it feels like your home, not just a space that you're renting. Just because you rent your space doesn't mean you can't own your style!
Let me know in the comments below, which of the five senses (other than sight, because again, that's kind of a given) do you particularly like to engage in your apartment? And how do you engage them? What kind of scented candles are you buying? What kinds of food are you eating, and in what vessels are you eating it? What kind of music do you like to listen to? What kinds of fabrics do you like to surround yourself with? Let me know in the comments below!
