Better Homes & Gardens: How to Craft a Better-for-You Home, According to Designer Anita Yokota
When we talk about design, we often focus on complementary color schemes and furniture silhouettes and textures: details that affect how a room looks. How your home makes you feel is a priority much less often—though that is slowly changing, as more people work to add relaxing spaces and other features that help them feel more comfortable at home. Still, there’s so much more to understand about how our homes affect all aspects of our lives, something designer Anita Yokota has been clued in on for years.
Earlier in her career, Yokota worked as a licensed marriage and family therapist. Today, with a popular blog, a totally done-over home, projects featured in publications including Real Simple and Apartment Therapy, and a new book (Home Therapy: Interior Design for Increasing Happiness, Boosting Confidence, and Creating Calm, available starting December 6), Yokota is on a mission to help everyone enrich their lives at home through design, ultimately creating homes that reflect and serve them.
“As a therapist who worked with clients for 20 years, I helped them make sense of their narrative,” Yokota tells Better Homes & Gardens. “And now as a designer, I get to help them tell it through their homes.”
While working as a therapist, Yokota noticed how the home often reflected issues her clients were dealing with—a bickering couple might start each morning fighting for space at their shared bathroom sink, for example, kicking off each day with an argument—and developed what she calls the Home Therapy Method: a multi-faceted approach to home decor and organization that makes your home more beautiful, sure, but also helps you create a more fulfilling, functional space that boosts your own life satisfaction.
Yokota’s method—and her book—starts with discovering your Core Desire. (Home Therapy includes a downloadable and printable Intake Form for readers to fill out to help determine their Core Desire.) Your Core Desire is the intention you want to express throughout your home.