The word ‘home’ used to mean one thing. A place you returned to. A backdrop for the life you were actually living somewhere else.
That’s changing. For a growing number of people, the home isn’t just where you sleep — it’s an expression of how you want to move through the world. The spaces you occupy shape your habits, your moods, your relationships. A lifestyle home isn’t designed around a style. It’s designed around a life.
From decoration to coherence
Trend forecaster Jaye Anna Mize, speaking at KBIS 2026, framed this shift precisely: design has moved ‘from decoration toward coherence.’ That word — coherence — is worth sitting with. It doesn’t mean everything matching. It means everything meaning something.
A lifestyle home reflects the full scope of how you live. The hotel stay that changed how you think about your bathroom. The café that made you rethink your kitchen. The walk through a forest that made you want to bring more texture and natural material inside. These aren’t design references you copy — they’re signals about how you want to feel at home.
Design operates across an ecosystem now
For decades, home design decisions were mostly self-contained within a category. Kitchen people thought about kitchens. Bedroom people thought about bedrooms. The categories rarely talked to each other, and they almost never talked to the wider world.
That’s no longer how people experience design. A hotel room influences bathroom expectations. A restaurant influences how someone imagines hosting at home. A clothing brand’s visual identity shapes color intuition for a living room. Design flows across the ecosystem, and the homes that feel most intentional are the ones where that broader influence has been considered and absorbed, not ignored.
This is especially visible in how younger generations approach their spaces. They’re less interested in a dream home — a fixed destination to arrive at — and more interested in a living home: one that evolves as they do, that holds the things they care about without performing a version of success they don’t believe in.
What a lifestyle home actually looks like
There’s no single aesthetic. That’s the point. But there are principles that show up consistently in homes designed around a life rather than a look.
It functions as well as it feels
The lifestyle home prioritizes how well a space performs over time. Better circulation. Smarter storage. Ease of use over visual scale. People are asking how their home can work better for the next five to seven years, not what it looks like in a listing photo.
It absorbs influence from outside the category
Travel, hospitality, food, fashion — the best-designed homes draw on all of it. Hotels ByDesign on SHG Living explores exactly this: how the design language of exceptional hospitality spaces can translate meaningfully into the places we actually live. The episode on boutique hotels in Portugal, for instance, offers more practical home design insight than most renovation guides ever will.
It’s built for how people actually gather
The formal dining room has nearly disappeared from new construction — only about 14% of new homes include one. In its place, the kitchen has become the emotional and social center of the home. A lifestyle home leans into this. It designs for informal, frequent gathering rather than occasional formal hosting. The kitchen is a workspace, a gathering space, a creative space. It’s where life actually happens.
It treats the home as infrastructure, not theater
This is perhaps the most significant shift. The home is increasingly understood as something to protect and invest in — not as aspirational theater, but as genuine shelter from economic, environmental, and personal uncertainty. Efficiency, resilience, and sustainability aren’t trade-offs for aesthetics anymore. They’re core to the design brief.
How to start designing your lifestyle home
The clearest starting point is observation, not Pinterest. Pay attention to the spaces that make you feel most like yourself. Hotels. Restaurants. Friends’ homes. A park. A bookshop. What do they have in common? What do they make possible? Start there.
From that foundation, build toward coherence rather than completeness. A lifestyle home doesn’t need to be finished — it needs to be honest. Every decision should be able to answer the question: does this serve how I actually live?
Watch on SHG Living
These shows bring the ideas in this article to life. Stream free on Roku, Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, Android TV, and web.
Hotels ByDesign — What exceptional hospitality spaces can teach us about designing where we live. Watch Now →
EcoTravel — Travel that connects place, design, and the way we want to live. Watch Now →
Simple Dwelling — Intentional, considered living in spaces that work as hard as they look good. Watch Now →