If you love to entertain, you know that luxury bar tables and welcoming smiles are not enough to make your home a truly inviting place for guests. But, unfortunately, when one thinks about friends whose homes are inviting to visit, it’s hard to pinpoint exactly why.
5 Ideas To Make Your Home Welcoming For Guests
Being a great host in an inviting home is more than just the sum of its parts. So let’s look at some of the less obvious but crucial factors that make a home inviting to guests.
Let Them In
Yes, you need to let guests enter your home, but to feel truly welcome and at ease, you need to invite guests into the ‘behind the scenes,’ if you will. While traditionally polite, leaving your guests to check on preparations in the kitchen is not very intimate.
Instead, open your doors to guests. Bring your guests along if you know that you will need to spend a lot of time in the kitchen. Plan a part of your evening around having your guests in the kitchen. Provide background music to clarify that you had intended your guests to join you.
Guests Should Know Where To Be
It is an experience to which we can all relate. Unfortunately, there is always that one host who doesn’t give much thought to where their party will occur. Before you know it, people gather in small groups all over the house. It is not fun for anyone and can drive your more socially awkward friend to leave early.
Tell your guests where things are happening and when they arrive. Using the previous point as an example, tell everyone that you are all starting in the kitchen, moving to the dining area, and then finally stopping off in the living room. Everyone knows what’s happening, and everyone is more comfortable.
Open Doors, Closed Doors
One of the ways to make your guests feel more at home is by informing them where they shouldn’t go. We have all experienced the dilemma when the directions to the bathroom are ‘oh, just down the hallway and then to your left,’ but then we someone end up in someone’s office area or bedroom.
There is a simple fix for this universally uncomfortable problem. Even if they are temporary, use signs to indicate important guest amenities like the bathroom or changing room. It feels odd to tell your guests that the rooms they can use are all indicated with signs, but it makes things so much more comfortable.
Leave Things A Tad Untidy
Now we know that this sounds ridiculous. Having guests over is the one time that you do not want to leave your house in a state, nor should you. However, a clean and perfectly manicured living room is not inviting because guests don’t want to get things untidy.
Unless they know you very well, they do not know how stern you are about that sort of thing, and most people will opt to avoid using a room that looks too pristine. A ‘misplaced’ comforter or a rogue scatter cushion help make a space feel lived in and, in turn, more inviting. A TV left on and on silent also works a charm.
Leave The Lights On
Leaving lights on is a waste of energy, but it is also a great way to help indicate where people should be and where they shouldn’t. As guests mingle, they tend to drift about a bit. If you have a brightly lit dining room adjacent to a well-lit living room, you will find guests in both at some point.
To keep the group together and put everyone at ease, leave lights on where ever guests may need to go and have them off where they need not.
