Welcome to Space Study! This series explores practical applications and real-life examples of spatial energetics.
Stand in a doorway, gaze out a window, or settle into your favorite corner of home and take a look around. What do you see? What catches your eye? How do you feel when you see it? These are our lines of sight. In the world of interiors, architects and designers deeply consider the view from one room to the next. They play with visuals to pull us forward into the next room or to settle the eye in a particular area of a space.
Whether we are designers or not, lines of sight are all around us. They are the unobstructed visuals that catch our eyes when we enter a room, gaze out a window, or snuggle up in our favorite chair. Within a space, there are endless examples of lines of sight.
Two of the most powerful lines of sight to look at are the approach to your home and your route first thing in the morning. Often these are more universal than personal, but they profoundly impact on you because you and any cohabitants frequent these routes most.
There are a myriad of details that can impact how we approach a space and often we can’t completely control the exterior of our structures (though if you can, this is an excellent place to begin!). I do not own my apartment and cannot change much about the exterior of my home.
What I can control is the line of sight that greets me when I step into my house. I often have stacks of books around. It’s often haphazard, a stack of books I’d like to read or am in the process of reading. One day I noticed the titles in the stack were not the most uplifting words to be reading day after day, over and over again. I was reading The Idiot, The Book of Difficult Fruit, The Ruin of All Witches, and Ancestor Troubles over and over again, day in and day out without even realizing it.
When I stopped to consider this message it was a bit of a buzzkill. There’s nothing inherently wrong with owning or reading any of these books. The trouble I was bumping into was displaying them so prominently. So I popped those titles into my credenza and grabbed a few more uplifting ones to create a new, more intentional stack. If you don’t have closed book storage, simply move them to a less prominent location within your space.
The newly assembled stack featured titles like The Art of Gathering, Sea of Tranquility, Magic Days, and Breath. Each one felt calming, uplifting, and inspiring when I read them. Simply by swapping out a stack of books, I shifted my perspective. Taking the time to curate a stack of books might feel frivolous or unnecessary, but it made me smile whenever I walked in the door.
Changes and adjustments don’t have to be big, grand undertakings. We don’t have to redesign entire rooms to benefit from this work. We just have to pay attention and notice what’s staring back at us.
Another example of this is my “morning route.” My bedroom is quite minimal, I don’t have much art on the walls so there isn’t too much to take in when I first wake up. However, my bedroom door is directly across from my kitchen sink. It is the first thing I see when I step out in the morning. I am not lucky enough to have a dishwasher and I used to be quite lackadaisical about doing my dishes. To say it is one of my least favorite chores is an understatement.
Yet I started to realize that when I woke up in the morning and stepped out to a pile of dirty dishes, my energy deflated. In order to make myself breakfast or brew a cup of tea, I would have to start with a frustrating chore. My negligence made it harder and harder to get out of bed in the morning (something I already struggle with, especially on chilly winter mornings!).
The moment I made this connection, I started doing my dishes every night without fail. Each morning, I crack a smile, seeing that I don’t have any lingering chores to complete before beginning my day.
In this case, I changed the line of sight by changing my behavior. The rule I created is simple: before I go to bed I do my dishes. I didn’t undertake a big kitchen redesign. I didn’t have to move the sink to a different part of the kitchen to reap the benefits, I started taking the time to set myself up for success the night before. The effects were profound.
During the lockdown, I lived with my parents. Directly across from my bedroom door was a full-length, paned mirror. It’s a beautiful piece, but it chopped up my reflection and felt a bit confronting first thing in the morning. Once I made it downstairs the first thing that caught my eye was the knife block. Energetically knives are sharp, prickly, and dangerous. They evoke imagery of fighting, war, and aggression. While an incredible and useful tool, they didn’t need to be the first thing any of us saw in the morning.
What did I do? Since it isn’t my home and moving the art around was out of the question, I covered the mirror with a beautiful scarf. With my parents' consensus, we switched to a knife block that sits in the drawer instead of out on the counter.
Around the same time, my sister adopted a very sweet, albeit slightly high-maintenance rescue dog (love you, Luna). We adore all her, but she runs the show a bit. The line of sight upon entering their main living area was the fridge. A big dog food bag sat atop the refrigerator at the highest point in the room, drawing the eye up. Energetically it created a power imbalance where the dog was the pinnacle of the home. So we moved the dog food into a lower cabinet. When they moved they needed to keep the food on the counter for space reasons, so they decant her food into a more visually pleasing container. The effects? Taking the focus off the dog so it doesn’t feel like she is the center of everything.
Simply shuffling where things are in your space and what is catching your eye is transformative. Notice your most impactful vistas, take the time to discern the subliminal messaging and adjust accordingly.
Want a second set of eyes on your space? That’s what I do! Book a Space Reading and we’ll set you up for success. As usual, if you have any questions feel free to reach out!
-MRD
I love your articles so much, Maggie! They’re such a gentle, beautiful reminder that small details are sometimes the ones that matter most, and that one doesn’t need a fancy designer house to make your living space feel conscious and made for *you*.