We spend a lot of time thinking about how our homes look. We choose paint colours, furniture, artwork and accessories, save images of beautiful interiors and think about whether everything works together visually.
But we need to move beyond just looking at our homes. We’re listening to them, touching them, smelling them and moving through them. We’re eating, sleeping, working, socialising and recovering in them — that’s a lot of heavy lifting for our homes to do.
We experience our homes through our senses all the time.
This is one of the simplest ways I explain sensory interior design, because I get asked about it a lot.
After more than 25 years working as an interior stylist and creative director, I’ve become very good at looking at a room. But through my work with The Sensory Home®, and through understanding my own sensory responses, I’ve learnt that a room can photograph beautifully and still not feel right.
That distinction has completely changed the way I design. Today, before I start thinking about what a room should look like, I ask three questions:
Who is the space for, how does it need to feel, and what do they need from it?
That is where designing for the senses begins.
If you’re completely new to the subject, I’ve written more about what sensory design is and how you can use it at home. Here, I want to go a little deeper into the five senses themselves.
1. SIGHT: WHAT ARE YOUR EYES PROCESSING?
Sight tends to dominate interior design. Colour, pattern, furniture, artwork, lighting and styling are the things we notice first, and they’re important. But with sensory design, I’m interested in more than whether they look good together. I’m interested in how much visual information the room is asking us to process.
Walk into your living room and really look. How many colours can you see? How many patterns? Are there shelves filled with objects, piles of paperwork, children’s things, cables or screens? Where does your eye naturally rest?
None of those things is necessarily a problem. I don’t believe sensory-friendly interior design has to mean beige walls, empty shelves or minimalist homes — far from it. I love colour, character, art, books and objects that tell a story. It’s about balance.
I’ve found this particularly important when designing spaces for wellbeing. Sometimes removing one competing element, grouping objects together or creating a quieter area for the eye can change the feeling of a room without removing its personality.
Light belongs here too. Rather than relying on one bright ceiling light, I focus on layering: natural daylight, task lighting where it’s needed and softer, warmer light for evenings — avoiding glare wherever possible. The right light at 9am isn’t necessarily the light I want at 9pm.
Colour needs the same consideration. When I developed the Paint for Wellness collection with Graham & Brown and their design studio, we weren’t interested in simply creating a palette of attractive colours. We started with what we need from different spaces — rest, focus, gathering and retreat — and considered how colour could form one layer of that experience.
You can read more about how I use colour to support wellbeing at home.
2. SOUND: LISTEN TO YOUR HOME
Sound is one of the senses I often ask people to actively stop and notice. Turn everything off for a moment and listen.
The hum of the fridge, traffic outside, a dishwasher, the television in another room, children upstairs, a washing machine, neighbours or the clattering from the kitchen. We become incredibly accustomed to the noises of our homes and sometimes have to concentrate before we can tune back in and hear them.
Just because we’ve stopped consciously noticing a sound doesn’t mean it has disappeared from our environment.
In my own design work, I rarely think about sound in isolation; I look at what the room is made from. Hard flooring, large windows, bare walls and hard furniture can create a very different acoustic experience from curtains, rugs, upholstery, timber, cork and other softer or sound-absorbing surfaces.
You don’t necessarily need specialist acoustic treatment. Sometimes a rug, layered curtains, upholstered furniture or simply changing the balance of materials in a room can help soften the experience.
For our Sensory Retreat at RHS Chelsea Flower Show, sound became one of the five sensory zones. We combined gentle music, moving water and the natural rustling of palms rather than treating sound as something that simply happened in the background. It became part of the design itself.
That project reinforced something I strongly believe: we shouldn’t only design what people can see.
3. TOUCH: THE MATERIALS YOUR BODY MEETS
Touch is much more than adding a lovely throw to a sofa. Think about how many surfaces your body comes into contact with at home: the floor beneath bare feet, the handle you pull every morning, your kitchen worktop, the chair you sit on for hours, the sheets against your skin and the sofa fabric against your arms.
Then there are sensations we don’t always immediately think of as touch: temperature, draughts and physical comfort.
I notice materials very quickly. Something can look beautiful, but if it feels scratchy, cold, overly shiny or uncomfortable, that changes my experience of it. How many times at home do you gravitate towards a certain chair or throw because its softness makes it feel almost like a favourite jumper?
photography lucijas ros
This is why I use so many natural and tactile materials in my work: timber, linen, wool, woven fibres, ceramics, glass and textured finishes. Not because every sensory home should contain the same materials, but because materiality gives a room another layer beyond the visual.
Contrast can be useful too: smooth beside textured, soft beside solid, cool ceramic against warm timber. The aim isn’t to fill a room with texture; it’s to consider what the body is actually experiencing.
This becomes particularly important where sensory sensitivities are involved because people’s responses to texture and temperature can be very different. I’ve written separately about adapting your home for sensory sensitivities.
4. SMELL: THE SENSE THAT CAN TAKE US STRAIGHT BACK
Scent fascinates me because it can change the feeling of a space without changing anything we can see. A particular smell can transport us somewhere almost instantly because of the close relationship between smell, memory and emotion.
At home, I think about this much more simply: what does home smell like to you?
Personally, I love bergamot and lavender. Familiar fragrances can become part of the ritual of arriving home or winding down at the end of the day. But sensory design isn’t about making every room smell strongly of something — sometimes the best scent is simply fresh air through an open window.
photography lucijas ros
Fragrance is also intensely personal. Something one person finds comforting can be overwhelming or unpleasant to someone else. So rather than starting with What fragrance should I buy?, I prefer to ask: What smells make me feel good — and which ones don’t?
That is a much more sensory-led way of approaching scent at home.
5. TASTE: THE FORGOTTEN SENSE IN INTERIOR DESIGN
Taste is probably the sense people are most surprised to hear me talk about. Obviously, we’re not tasting our sofas, but think about how much of home life revolves around food and drink.
The first coffee of the morning, cooking while everyone gathers in the kitchen, sitting around a table, growing herbs on a windowsill, eating outside in summer or making tea before bed. Taste is connected to ritual, connection and the way we experience home.
When I designed The Sensory Retreat, I wanted taste represented alongside sight, sound, touch and scent. We incorporated edible planting because I wanted the project to demonstrate that multisensory design doesn’t stop at the obvious interior-design elements.
At home, this can be incredibly simple. Grow herbs close to where you cook. Make the dining table somewhere you actually want to sit. Think about the lighting at mealtimes. Put away the laptop. Use the bowl or mug that feels lovely in your hands.
Sensory design is often found in these very ordinary moments.
SENSORY DESIGN ISN’T ABOUT MAKING EVERYTHING CALM
This is important. A sensory-friendly home isn’t necessarily a calm home.
Sensory design isn’t about stripping away colour, sound, pattern and personality until we’re all living in silent, neutral boxes. Sometimes I want a space to help me switch off; sometimes I need it to help me concentrate. At other times I want energy, creativity, conversation or connection.
We don’t all experience the same environment in the same way either. What one person finds relaxing, another may find understimulating. What feels wonderfully energising to one person may feel overwhelming to someone else.
The one word I come back to time and again in my work is choice.
This is why The Sensory Home® isn’t about prescribing one particular interior style. It’s about understanding what you need from a space and how you want to feel in it, then using design to support that.
It’s also the thinking behind The Sensory Home book and the work I’ve developed since writing it.
TRY THIS: EXPERIENCE YOUR HOME DIFFERENTLY
Choose the room you spend the most time in and sit there for five minutes. For once, don’t think about whether you like the décor. Instead, pay attention to what you’re actually experiencing.
What can I see? Where does my eye go? Is anything competing for my attention?
What can I hear? What sounds have I stopped consciously noticing? What can I feel? Think about texture, seating, flooring and temperature. What can I smell? Is there a scent you enjoy — or one you’d rather wasn’t there? And finally: how does the room make me feel?
You don’t need to change anything yet, just try notice and listen to your senses.
Because after years of designing and styling interiors, that’s still where I think the best design decisions begin: not with what a room looks like, but with the person experiencing it.
Pippa Jameson is the founder of The Sensory Home®, author of The Sensory Home and creator of The Sensory Home® Framework™, an approach to designing environments around sensory experience and everyday wellbeing.
