Myquillyn Smith, 2020, 193 pages

“On any given day, chances are good that you and I could walk outside and immediately know what season it is. No matter where you live, natural rhythms are showing off outside, and if you pay attention, you’ll notice them. Without knowing the date, we can know the season because we experience it with our senses.” From Welcome Home by Myquillyn Smith

Welcome Home will show you how to make the inside of your home in tune with the season outside. The author, Myquillyn Smith, doesn’t have any particular decorating style she promotes, rather accepting the fact that our home furnishings are collected over a lifetime and maybe we like parts of many different styles. She explains how a seasonally decorated home prepares us for hospitality. Her words will make you excited about decorating and hosting with simplicity and avoiding the consumerism that often bombards us. She tells us what to splurge or save on, what to give attention to and what is safe to ignore.

The book is arranged by season, beginning with the fall. For each season she chooses three areas to decorate with a seasonal touch, along with filling her home with scents and textures that speak of the season to her. Then her home is also ready for hospitality. And here again, she focuses on three things – the food, the mood and the people.

Some of her advice is commonplace : rearrange, shop your yard and home, and cook seasonally to fill your home with the season’s scents. Some other advice was new: have a focal point in each room, designate something as your signature piece, and use all your senses in the decorating process.

You will like Welcome Home if you, too, feel some challenges in creating a welcoming home within the limits of your circumstances. Welcome Home has given me some principles to apply to my own decorating dilemmas. This has simplified the process and given me confidence to take the risk and try new things. I hope this book can do the same for you!

There’s more

If you enjoy Welcome Home, you might also like Myquillan’s other book, The Nesting Place. This book takes into account that one third of us are renters, we have limited time and money, and yet we also want to turn our house into a lovely home. I love how she makes contentment a priority. My favorite part is the theme running through the book that we can make a home here today by seeing the beauty in our everyday stuff.

And then there’s Cozy Minimalist, also by the same author. A little advice from this book guides me when shopping at thrift stores or anywhere, for that matter: don’t buy home decor items smaller than a pineapple. My daughter rolls her eyes when I remind her of my new maxim as she points out some cute knick knack. It makes sense though. When your are appointing something as large as a house, anything smaller than a pineapple isn’t going to make much impact.

God is the original homemaker. He started with Eden and is working on the mansions in Heaven. It’s no wonder He gives us a desire and a need to create a home for ourselves and loved ones, too. These books might make that job just a little bit easier.

Happy reading, decorating and hosting!

–Liz