3 Ways to Incorporate Friluftsliv into your Home*

Summer is a great time to do some kind of home improvement. The weather is nice, paint dries faster and your rooms are brighter. Whether it’s giving your house a lick of paint or getting a new sofa or even adding an extension, summer is a great time to do it. One of the ways you can really change up your home is embracing friluftsliv – the Scandinavian philosophy of reconnecting with nature.

Friluftsliv (pronounced free-loofts-liv) literally translated means “open air living” and while it’s nice to take the odd and really get back to nature it’s not something you can do all the time, especially in the UK where the threat of rain looms over us 90% of the year. But what if you could incorporate friluftsliv into your home? Today I’m sharing 3 ways you can do that with Festive Lights, that will not only help your mental wellness but give your home a bit of a lift too.

Natural Art Work
By this, I’m not talking about sending your kid out in the woods and asking them to forage then bringing it all home to make a collage. As fun as that could be for an afternoon activity, bringing live nature into your house and displaying it isn’t a great idea as it’ll eventually die and it will attract bugs. But what if there was a way to do this artificially? Using a box frame and some faux twigs that you can pick up from places like Amazon, with some indoor fairy lights you can create a beautiful piece of art that also functions as a light. Instead of buying a bunch of flowers from the supermarket that will last less than a week, you can order some beautiful faux foliage online that you can either pop in a vase for a permanent floral feature or line shelves with.

Solar Lights in the Garden
One of the easiest ways to embrace friluftsliv is in your garden and a great way to do this is with solar lights. Solar lights are a safe and practical way to bring light into your garden at night, perfect if you’re doing some back to nature and watching a movie, eating or even sleeping out there. And they’re incredibly popular this year given all the sun we’re having at the moment. You can go with a string of fairylights or for something that is much more nature orientated why not go with flower shaped solar light that will blend seamlessly with your garden but light it up once the sun goes down.

Back To Nature Furniture
You can also furnish your house the friluftsliv way by choosing reclaimed wood furniture. This is wood that has been made into something but left looking as rustic as possible and it’s growing in popularity. Think lodge in the wilderness. It looks great, makes your home feel cosy and you can start small with simple shelves or storage solutions, or go all out with tables, bed frames and even units. It’s not cheap but it will be worth it for a home filled with good energy from nature! I’ve never been a huge lover of the white everywhere you so often see on the Internet so I think some of these pieces are amazing and actual works of art rather than furniture! What an investment!

If you want to learn more about a friluftsliv way of living, Inhabitat has a great article on it and I have to admit, I’m quite on board with this natural way of decorating, maybe not enough to live in nature itself though!