Hygge: The Lifestyle and Design Danes Swear By

A pronunciation guide for all the Southern people (like us) reading this:

-First of all, it’s not pronounced hih-gee or hy-guh, it’s hue-ga. (or hoo-ga depending on who you ask) 

-It’s all because this is a Danish word. Don’t worry, you aren’t crazy! It’s just a different language. 

So, what does it mean?

To simplify it, hygge is all about coziness and simplicity. In Norweigian, the word simply translates to “wellbeing”. This concept is something that Danish/Scandinavian/Norweigian people and more have come to embrace for years now.

In case you didn’t know, Denmark’s inhabitants reign as the world’s happiest people. (Closely followed by Switzerland, Norway, and Finland. Hygge, people!) Just google it!

So although hygge connects to lifestyle in a variety of ways, it also surely links directly to interior design. After all, happiness starts in the home! Or…we think it does, at least.

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Even though we live in the hot, humid South, who says we can’t feel all cozy? We’re super ready for Fall and Winter this year. Can you tell?

Hygge- How do I do it?

We’ve gone ahead and done the research for you. Stay tuned for a short list of some easy tips to embrace Hygge!

1. Warm Lighting–Grab Some Candles and Fairy Lights!

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Warm lighting is the end-all-be-all of cozy feelings. Whether your prefer scented or unscented, candles make gatherings, baths, and chill-out time way better.

“Rumored as one of the largest consumers of candles in the world per capita, Denmark and other Scandinavian countries have embraced the power of the warming glow of candlelight. Whether scented or unscented, candlelight transforms the clean, fresh style of classic Scandinavian interiors into a flickering escape from winter’s chill and a simple lit candle is seen as one of the most fundamental hygge moments to achieve. Danish brand Skandinavisk have even developed a Hygge fragrance with notes of brewed tea, baked strawberry cake, rose petals and wild mint for the ultimate hygge experience.” – The LuxPad

Wanna try out that candle? Here it is below.

Hygge Scented Candle; Taken from https://skandinavisk.com/product/hygge-190gr-scented-candle/

2. Invest in a Blanket (Or at least some comfy pillows.)

There is nothing more hygge in the home than a soft blanket, pillow, rug, or really any textile! Try layering to get the most out of your space.

And guess what…stay in bed!

“There’s nothing better, or more luxurious, than spending an extra hour or two in bed. Luckily, hygge encourages this concept, whether it’s enjoying a Sunday doze, reading the morning paper, or having breakfast in bed. Create a cozy space to snuggle up in with plenty of layers – pile on the quilts, blankets and pillows for an indulgent place to relax.” – Culture Trip

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3. Remember that Hygge is a Mindset

Display treasured memories, throw out clutter that stresses you out, indulge a little, be mindful, and spend meaningful time with loved ones. That’s the true essence of Hygge!

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Are you dreaming of some cool weather like us? Although hygge reminds us of Winter-time, it’s something you can embrace year-round. And if you want a little more inspo, we created a Pinterest board just for that.

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-Keri Rowell, Lott Furniture Co.

Color: Your Greatest Ally in the Home

It’s Springtime, and that means a couple of things…Spring cleaning and Spring shopping! The beautiful weather and new blooms just spark a need in most of us to refresh our space. After cleaning out, haul some new colors in!

At Lott Furniture Co., we’ve brought in tons of new products this season with intentions to give our customers the best options to brighten their space! We’re now offering made-to-order rugs and pillows, as well as custom furniture! (There’s no sense in getting something generic, when you can get something uniquely designed by you!)

If you didn’t know already, color does a whole lot more than just glue your space together.

According to HGTV, color absolutely can:

  • Enhance feelings of health and wellbeing
  • Modify perceived temperature — make your space feel warmer or cooler
  • Transform perceived space — make your space feel larger, or more cozy and intimate
  • Illuminate dark areas
  • Create mystery and romance in dull areas
  • Energize static areas

With that being said, what are you waiting for?

Get Started

A couple of the easiest ways to incorporate color into your space are through textiles and paint. No matter what your budget allows, there is definitely a product to fit your needs.

Paint

Paint can do a lot…a whole lot. Check out this before and after with incredible changes from just paint and a new rug!

If you’re anything like me, you’re on a budget. Making changes like these don’t have to break the bank.

And if you’re anything more like me, you love Joanna Gaines. Thankfully, the Hearth & Hand line at Target has gallons of paint under $50!

Textiles

Now for our personal favorites…pillows and rugs! If you can’t go all out with painting right now, the best thing you can do is get a few new pillows and a rug to tie everything together!

We have dozens to choose from in store, and hundreds to look at in our catalogue! (We’re also able to get you a sample before ordering.)

Pillows and rugs add not only color, but also texture variety. This can really diversify your space!

Posted by Lott Furniture Co. on Monday, March 5, 2018

What the Designers Have to Say

“The details are not the details. They make the design.”- Charles Eames

Our friend Sarah Moffett, local interior designer and entrepreneur who has worked with HGTV Home Town, contributed a few tidbits on the topic of color.

“Details like paint colors can make or break a space. Lighting and other design elements largely affect how a color reads in a room and no two spaces are alike.

I also encourage for the backdrop (aka walls) to remain fairly neutral so the personality of the furnishings can speak. There’s a special place for using color on walls, but it needs to be intentional and in a space where the other elements are well-coordinated with the color.” -Sarah Moffett


Stay tuned for more design blogs! We’re in the middle of revamping our content. If you want more tips on using color, come see us Tuesday, May 8 at 6-8 pm for Wine & Design! We have complimentary refreshments, and our friend Sarah Moffett will be joining us for a demo on choosing paint colors. 

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Concept & Craft: Introducing Wine & Design

Ammie West left, Teresa Ishee right

There’s nothing quite like making a house feel like home, but sometimes, it’s hard to find a starting point. At Lott Furniture Co., we are here to bring you home, and we’ve been doing just that since 1917.

After two events, we are happy to announce that Wine & Design is here to stay! In case you’ve missed it, we’ve started an after-hours event recurring the second week of each month.

We have intentions to bring more people Downtown after 5 o’clock, and encourage our friends and neighbors to attend other events with our fellow merchants as well.

What’s Wine & Design?

Centerpiece by Teresa Ishee

A typical Wine & Design night looks like:

 

  1. Interesting interior design demos and home tips
  2. Friendly company
  3. Most importantly, snacks and complimentary WINE!

We have a featured guest each month (sometimes two!) with experience and expertise with interior design, seasonal treats, wine, and plenty of fun people to hang out and discuss design with!

November Recap

We had so much fun at Wine & Design this month, we wanted to share a few tips we learned for all you people who missed out! Ammie West, Laurel native, came and prepped us for extra holiday guests, and Teresa Ishee (Ellisville) showed us just how easy it is to set a beautiful and functional Thanksgiving table!

 

Top Tips from Ammie West:

Tips from Ammie West

  • “Create alternative seating by using stools, poufs, and pillows on the floor.” Ammie suggested using your coffee table surrounded with pillows or footstools as your kids table! She even unrolled a roll of kraft paper to place on the top for kids to color on when bored. Also: it protects the table from a mess!
  • “Use the coffee table as a snack buffet.” Don’t underestimate the uses of a coffee table! Ammie suggested setting up your hors d’oeuvres, desserts, and snacks there. She also mentioned using a desk or dresser base as your buffet! 
  • “Have an area where cells phones can be placed and/or charged since everybody will be taking lots of pictures and videos!” We love this so much. This is a perfect idea!

Top Tips from Teresa Ishee:

  • Place setting by Teresa Ishee

    Form follows function. And that means, make sure your table is functional! Teresa created a centerpiece that was edible! Try using food as your focal point. (She used a cake stand, and cheese board to stage some *very yummy* charcuterie)

  • A great touch is to add some fresh greenery or florals. For this example, she cut some fresh rosemary springs to decorate with and to place in her napkin holders. The fresh smell was the perfect touch!
  • When placing your setting, your silverware should face towards the plate and be sorted in the order you use them. (For example, your salad fork and soup spoon should be on the outside because you use them first.)

Jana Ishee

For every single one of my twenty-four years, I have watched with varying degrees of frustration, relief, or neutrality as my mother redecorates our entire house on a whim. Our house has seen many iterations: all-white French country chateau, shabby chic, harsh Tudor regality, gauche Baroque lavishness, and quintessential Southern Living living. Many times have I watched my mother, breathless with excitement, burst through the garage door, bags overflowing with silk flowers and throw pillows in her hands, shouting “I had an idea!”

On days like those, when she is struck with the fire of inspiration, Teresa is an unstoppable whirlwind of productivity. She suddenly has the strength and dexterity to lift a recliner and carry it from room-to-room. She is more than capable of shoving an overstuffed couch from one end of the living room to the other three or four times without breaking a sweat. I usually sit back and watch, afraid to touch the ferociously spinning ceiling fan blade that is my mother when she’s ready to “rearrange,” as she calls it. (I’ve always thought it funny that she usessuch a simple word to describe such a complex process.) However, since Mother has begun putting her personal style and technique into words at Wine and Design, I have begun to consider why exactly my mother is so often altering the chemistry of our home. Is it a chemical or physical change? What does the change do? Why does she enjoy it? Why does the house always seem a little better afterwards, even if the couch is now turned away from the TV or the coffee table is in just the right spot to always ram your knee into it as you stand up from the recliner? I think I have it figured out.

Our home is a metaphor for our lives. As our family grows and changes, so to does our house. A baby is born, so the living room is rearranged so that we all fit around the recliner where, inevitably, the mother will sit with her new baby as everyone takes turns poking at it and pointing out how much he or she looks like an Ishee. Someone’s birthday comes along, and the breakfast table is suddenly much larger and crammed with chairs to accommodate all the Ishees, hungrier for conversation with one another than for whatever meal the birthday boy or girl has picked. (This could be a stretch in our house, but I’ll take an artistic risk.) Our house and its contents are ever-changing, just like my mother’s tastes, and the moods and needs of those who live inside it.  

As I sit and listen to my mother explain how to set a table to fit as many people as possible, I become suddenly and powerfully aware that a house can be a reflection of someone’s tastes. It can be beautiful and reasonably functional, but if it’s a place that’s cozy and comfortable, a place you can’t wait to get back to after a long vacation, that is thanks entirely to the home being a reflection of the family who resides within it. In our case, this means that our house must be, to use Teresa’s terminology, “rearranged,” as often as is necessary to keep up with the rearrangement of our family. 

-Jana Ishee, daughter of Teresa Ishee, attendee of Wine & Design, and friend to Lott Furniture Co.

What we gathered from both of our wonderful guests is that: Home is personal. What you think is homey may not translate to someone else. But we can agree on is that functional pieces are always going to be the most useful to you. When picking something pretty, think: How can I think outside of the box and use that?

What we are so thankful for this Thanksgiving is our customers and friends. Thank you so much for making our lives so busy and so fulfilled. There is nothing we enjoy more than bringing you home.

We hope to see you at our next Wine & Design on Thursday, December 14 from 6 PM- 7:30 PM. We will have another special guest that we can’t wait to announce, and live entertainment from Nashville artist, Anna Morgan Michel.

Be sure to check out our first Concept & Craft blog, and watch closely for a new one! We post unique finds, and interior design tips and tricks in the series!

Watch our social media closely for updates on our next Christmas Wine & Design, and sign up in the gold box for email updates every time we post!

-Keri Rowell, Lott Furniture Co.

Concept & Craft: Wall Clusters

What makes a house a home?

There are countless ways to answer that question; however, our answer lies in how the family represents themselves inside. 

Your furniture, your art, your knick-knacks, your books and movies, your family photos…these are the things that truly make your house your home.

Here at Lott Furniture Co., we are invested in bringing you home and want to help any way we can! So, we are introducing a new series of blogs called Concept & Craft written specifically to do just that. We are doing the digging for you, so you can get your hands on the best design tips, DIY projects, unique finds, and newest trends in interior design.

Gallery walls have been around for what seems like forever, but we’ve found some new ways to make them especially unique to you and your home. Traditionally, people have mostly used art and photos (Which is definitely still acceptable!), but we wanted to show you guys a few unconventional options to mix up your gallery wall!

Recently, we created a permanent wall cluster for our front window wall in the store and used only antique and repurposed items. And the best part is that we only spent around $50 dollars!

Shadow boxes are always a great addition to a gallery wall. This one is an old sewing machine drawer!

Anything can go in shadow boxes. We used ink bottles and old odds and ends.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We headed on over to The Rusty Chandelier and bought some old antique frames of all different shapes and sizes, found some old stove parts in The V, and repurposed a few sewing machine drawers into shadow boxes for some vintage ink bottles we discovered in the office.

Try putting frames inside of frames.

These are three antique drawer pulls we found upstairs!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Don’t be afraid to think outside the box and use things that normally wouldn’t be seen hung on a wall. That’s what makes your space uniquely you.

If you want to stick with photos, art, and keepsakes, we found you a super easy and fairly inexpensive source to create your gallery wall online. Check out Framebridge to create your own wall cluster and have it shipped to you, starting at $39 dollars. This website is so cool because you can ship them what you want to frame, upload files onto the website, or take personal photos directly from your instagram! There’s 3 steps:

  1. Choose your perfect frames from a wide, custom selection.
  2. Upload your files or mail in physical pieces.
  3. Receive your gallery wall!

For some sample wall cluster layouts and extra tips click here and here.

Also, one of the coolest wall clusters I’ve ever seen was on HGTV Home Town last night! Erin and Mallorie picked out a selection of antique plates and placed them in a unique pattern on the wall.

Check out this video on HGTV’s website of how they did it here. And it gets better. You can get Laurel Mercantile Co. hand curated plate clusters on their website! Check them out here.

This was the first of many blogs to come dedicated to help you make your house a home. Stay tuned to see DIY projects, useful design tips and tricks, and cool finds!

Sign up in the gold box to get email updates every time we post! 

-Keri Rowell, Lott Furniture Co.