The Rituals of Home

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The Rituals of Home

This week I had a fascinating conversation with someone who was staying at our holiday cottage. We were talking about the importance of human connection and he used a phrase I hadn’t heard before (at least not in the way he meant it) “social hygiene”.

Much like sleep hygiene, he explained, it’s about the rituals and good practices that support our social health. Spending time face to face, eating together, talking, laughing, sharing experiences. Things that are so important to our wellbeing.

It got me thinking about how that might apply to our homes. If we can have social hygiene, what other kinds of hygiene might there be within our homes? Atmospheric hygiene? Ergonomic hygiene? Clutter hygiene? Even eco hygiene? Not hygiene in the cleaning sense, but the small rituals and good practices that help our homes support us physically and emotionally.

Those everyday acts that are the expression of us embodying our homes.

Here at home every morning starts with opening the shutters. I love the sounds they make. The clunk of the wood, the metallic ringing of the closing bar being lifted to unbolt them and the soft thunk as they’re pushed back into place. Lying in bed you can hear when other members of the family are waking up because, very faintly, you hear the shutters opening in other rooms. It’s the sound of the house emerging into a new day.

Dave goes downstairs and makes me a cup of tea every morning (the real reason I married him) and we sit in bed for a while looking at the trees outside the window. Sometimes we watch the birds. In summer the cats occasionally come in that way. In winter the light is low and muted; in summer it flickers through the leaves and falls in dancing shafts across the room. There’s nearly always something to notice.

When I eventually go downstairs, the first thing I do is open the French doors in the kitchen. I want to smell the air outside and let some of it into the house. I’ll do this for probably nine or ten months of the year — it has to be REALLY cold outside to stop me.

Then there’s Dave grinding coffee, me warming the teapot warming. Tiny, repetitive things that could easily seem insignificant but actually ground the beginning of the day.

And i’m inclined to call this a sort of atmospheric hygiene. Light, air, sound, scent, temperature — all those things we experience in a home without consciously registering them.

And then there are the rituals that we’ve actually designed the house and garden around.

We have three long dining tables outside, which might sound excessive, but they all have a purpose. Where we eat depends on the time of day, the month, which way the wind is blowing, what’s flowering in the garden, what we’re eating and how many of us there are.

One extra-long one stretches beneath the apple trees. It’s beautifully cool and shady during the day, but simply magical in the evening when we string fairy lights through the trees and put candles along the table.

Another is beside the outdoor fireplace and barbecue. That’s where we gather when it’s a little chillier. We light the fire and I bring out sheepskins to throw over the chairs and rugs for when the temperature drops.

And then there’s the table beside the pizza oven, just outside the kitchen door. That’s our everyday outside table. It’s convenient, there’s an awning we can wind out when the sun is too strong, and in summer we eat breakfast there most mornings.

Of course not every ritual is about gathering lots of people together and we have other nooks and hideaways dotted around the garden.

There’s a tiny round Greek taverna table under the fig tree which is perfect for lunch à deux. The verandah outside the beach hut looks across the dry garden and catches the morning sun; you can sit there watching the bees and birds and really appreciate the enormous Marsh skies. And at the back of the house we have another verandah with two daybeds facing each other, which is my favourite place for afternoon tea or a six o’clock Aperol with my feet up.

Each has its own mood and the more I think about it, the more I realise that we have in fact designed much of our home around rituals rather than rooms.

Where will we want to drink our morning tea? Where will two people want to sit for lunch? Where will ten people want to eat on a summer evening? Where can someone disappear with a book? Where will everyone gather when it gets cold?

That’s what good design should do. Not dictate how we’re supposed to live, but work to make the things we want to do easier.

For Dave’s 60th birthday we had about forty friends to stay and celebrate. It was the most beautiful summer evening and people had come from all over the world — people who had meant something special to him at different points in his life.

By the end of the night there were bodies everywhere. Those who hadn’t managed to secure an actual bedroom slept in the cabins, the caravan, on sofas… anywhere we could find to put them.

It was a magical night but I think my favourite part of a party like that is often the morning after. One by one everyone begins to emerge from wherever they’ve slept and wend their way towards the kitchen. Dressing gowns, pyjamas, shorts and T-shirts. Slightly tired, slightly hungover and completely relaxed. Usually we will make pancakes. Foster House has somehow become famous amongst our friends for pancakes. I don’t remember deciding this would be a tradition, but people who stay now expect them, so pancakes it is. Coffee is ground, tea is made and everyone lingers around chatting about the night before.

I love that bit because there’s no occasion any more. Nobody is performing. The party is over and it’s just a house full of people who know one another, being together. Of course, there is another side to all this “social hygiene”. Shoes EVERYWHERE. Coats over the backs of chairs. Glasses on every available surface. People standing around chatting in the kitchen when you’re trying to cook. And the washing up… so much washing up. We actually installed a second dishwasher because there are six of us to start with and we’re regularly feeding eight or ten. Probably not the most romantic design decision we’ve ever made, but one of the most useful — I’m thinking this one falls into the  “ergonomic hygiene” category.

And this is where I start to wonder how many of these different sorts of “hygiene” there might be — and how much they overlap.

Good social hygiene can be absolutely terrible for clutter hygiene. Ergonomic hygiene might mean admitting that the way you actually use a room matters more than how you imagined you’d use it — or that your family requires two dishwashers (we had to forfeit a whole bank of very useful drawers to accommodate the extra machine).

So now I'm thinking what might the other types of ‘hygiene” look like?

“Eco hygiene” could be those small choices we make to try and ‘do our bit’ for the environment — repairing, reusing, buying old things, growing things, wasting less. Not trying to achieve some kind of saintly environmental perfection, but just the inevitable compromises between wanting to live more sustainably and ordinary family life.

“Clutter hygiene” might be the daily act of 555: put 5 things away, donate 5 things and throw away 5 things — not as a rule but as a concept or goal. I mean honestly, even practising 111 would work in this house!

These aren’t rules and they’re certainly not another list of things to get right. They’re just the little things we do, over and over again, that make living here feel good.

I’ve always said that homes should feel as good as they look and how we practise living in them is the embodiment of that.

Atlanta x

If this week’s Studio Notes resonated with you…

You might enjoy One Calm Moment, my guide to creating small moments of calm and beauty within your home — not by redecorating, but by looking at what you already have a little differently.

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