Missing the Ocean? Bring the Beach Vacation to Your Home

1. Adopt a special vacation breakfast ritual at home. Whether it’s putting a special cream in the coffee, squeezing some fresh juice or keeping quarts of strawberries on hand, try to bring a vacation breakfast treat into your home for the summer. It will start the day off right. You deserve it.

 

2. Blow up a favorite photo you took at the beach and hang it in your room. Or create a fun collage or memory book from your favorite summer vacation snapshots.

 

3. Find a color that relaxes you like a beach cottage does and use it. This can mean painting an accent wall, swapping in some pillows or lamps from another room, or using colorful sheets.

4. Create a mostly white bedscape. This can be as simple as flipping your duvet cover over to the white side, if it has one, going without a duvet cover for the summer or throwing a plain white sheet on top of it all.

5. Put your favorite beach finds on display. A piece of driftwood on your bureau, a Mason jar full of sand or stones, or one favorite shell can awaken the memory of a favorite place.
Here the designers created an artful arrangement simply by placing similar shells on a pale blue tray.

 

6. Bring some of your outdoor or porch furniture inside. If you live somewhere muggy, like I do, most days it’s too hot to even enjoy the porch or the patio. Bring in a piece or two of your wicker, rattan, bamboo or metal furniture indoors for a few months for a lighter look.
When it’s nice enough to enjoy the porch again, it’ll be time to switch it back.

7. Create a cozy reading nook. I never plow through books faster than I do on vacation. Set up a special place so that you can work a little vacation time into every day with a good book, a magazine or the paper.

Carve out at least 20 extra minutes each day to give this to yourself. I bet you can find the minutes by replacing playing-with-your-phone time with reading nook time.

8. Go offline more often. Speaking of playing-with-your-phone time, try to cut down on your screen time in the summer, especially when you are enjoying the company of others. Find a place to stow devices out of site.

I have to admit, whenever I stay at a place with bad reception or no Wi-Fi, I feel a little panicky the first day. But then I relax into it and appreciate being unreachable. Be more mindful of when and why you reach for your phone. If you’re having trouble cutting back, imagine Broadway star Patti LuPone stopping midsong to yell at you to turn off your phone.

 

9. Go bare. If you have an area rug that’s full of dark, wintry colors, roll it up for the season and enjoy beach cottage-like bare floors.