How does our childhood home influence our interior style?

I’ve been thinking about something recently. If we are a product of our past experiences, then the setting of where we spent our childhood and formative years must play a key role in who we are and how we perceive our surroundings. But how does that setting – our childhood home – impact our thoughts and feelings about interiors? Is it possible that it may have influenced our interior style today? Do we decorate as a reaction against our childhood home or in the hope of recreating certain elements that we look back on with fond memory?

I grew up in a single parent household, just my mum and I. I had a privileged upbringing in a very supportive, loving setting. The concept of home for me is something that’s warm and welcoming – like a great, big hug. I know some people may not have been so lucky and the thought of home might fill them with a much more complicated tangle of negative feelings. In today’s post, I don’t want to focus so much on the childhood than the home itself – more specifically, our decorative choices.

Perhaps your childhood home was so full of knick-knacks and cluttered surfaces that you seek something altogether more pared-back and minimal. Perhaps your childhood home was so ordered and tidy, that you enjoy letting things go a little and being able to put your feet up on the coffee table without anyone telling you not to. Or maybe by using the same tones as your childhood home it gives you a feeling of safety and security. Maybe a beautiful chair handed down from generation to generation provides that window into the past. Maybe a familiar chintz wallpaper brings with it a tingly, rose-tinted feeling of nostalgia.

My interior style has some elements that I can trace back to my childhood home in some shape or form. My childhood home was fairly neutral and timeless in style, with Farrow & Ball-hued walls, wooden floors and classic antique furniture. We stayed in the same place for all of my childhood and my mum still lives there, so it’s seen plenty of iterations and DIY projects, from Seventies wood panelling and a mustard velvet sofa, through Nineties Jocasta Innes paint effects to Noughties simplicity and a grey painted kitchen. My mum, with a creative eye for detail, loves to decorate and the family joke is that she’s always painting a wall or up a ladder with a hammer in her hand. Like me, her home is her creative outlet.

So it’s safe to say I knew my Hardwick White from my Cornforth White and my Mole’s Breath from my Elephant’s Breath from fairly early on. And in the time of Changing Rooms, changing the colour of a wall and doing it yourself was an easy way to uplift a room without splurging a lot of money. I still have that frugal mindset myself; I don’t mind doing a bit of DIY and getting stuck in (although I’ve long since abandoned the paint effects!). Not only does it help save the pennies, it’s the sense of satisfaction of having made your home your own.

But my childhood home taught me so much more than just how to pick a paint colour. Without really knowing it, that one home helped formulate my ethos and attitude when it comes to design and interiors. Because as well as specific items imprinted on my memory – a Victorian nursing chair in faded pink velvet, the bronze nude sculptures, a printer’s tray filled with memories, the pencil markings on the bathroom door that charted my height – it’s the feeling and ambience I remember the most.

My childhood home had a relaxed air to it; slightly rough around the edges but lovingly lived in. It wasn’t showy. There were marks where the dog chewed the edge of the dining table as a puppy, my school artwork proudly pinned up on the wall and scuffs on the walls. There were piles of art books and shelves of novels, and always fresh flowers. Furniture past its best was held onto and cherished years after the upholstery had faded, things were fixed before being thrown away, and hardly anything was bought new (until I got my hands on the IKEA catalogue in the Nineties and suddenly wanted to take ownership of my bedroom with pink walls, lava lamps and inflatable furniture…). It was an unpretentious, care-free space that wore the passage of time with ease.

While my own home is a little more minimal (I had a brief moment of rebellion when I declared I didn’t want any bookshelves, and tried to bring order to my mum’s bookshelves by arranging them by colour…), I’ve tried to imbue it with a similar feeling or essence. And that’s about embracing imperfection and not worrying if things aren’t always pristine and polished.  That translates into an informal layout where things don’t have to match, natural materials like linen and jute that aren’t quite perfect, and a neutral backdrop that means the space can evolve everyday. It’s a real home; there’ll be some wear and tear, some muddy paw prints on the white-painted floors and some things that could always be improved. In my house, the dog’s allowed on the sofa and you don’t need to use a coaster on the coffee table.

It’s taken me a while to let go and let my home loosen and unravel with me (we started with coasters but we soon gave up). In a world of picture perfect Instagram interiors that have been primped, tidied, styled and then edited, it’s easy to forget that a real home doesn’t always look so camera ready.

My husband said that he has a friend who wasn’t allowed to put any posters up in his room because it might ruin the decorative scheme his interior designer mother had conceived. I thought that was a shame, because there should be no rules when it comes to interiors. Your home should be where you can express yourself freely and completely, whatever your style. (Incidentally, my mum didn’t seem to mind when as a grungy, baggy jean wearing teenager I put up a Kurt Cobain poster which stated ‘I hate myself and I want to die’ on the back of my door…).

My childhood bedroom was probably the first place where I got a taste for interior design. My idea of fun was moving all the furniture around, having a good old tidy up and I guess what I would call now, ‘styling’. The purple and silver striped walls and stars on the ceiling haven’t come with me into my own neutral home, but the idea that a home can be an outlet for creative expression has.

If we spend sixteen, eighteen, or however many years in our childhood home, those surroundings are bound to have an impact once we find our own space in the world. It’s just what you take from it. It could be something physical like a chair, a piece of art or a wall colour, but it could also be something much more intangible; a way of living or looking at things, whether as a response to or a reaction against.

We carry with us echoes of the past that might find their way into our homes. A home is not a catalogue image of perfection, frozen in time, but a reflection of who we are. It has many layers, some which you might not be able to see at first glance. But if you trace them back, you might better understand what home means for you.

I would love to know, do you think your childhood home has influenced your interior style? Now that you can think about it, can you see any traces in your home today?