08/05/2026
People talk about “high maintenance” and “low maintenance” homes as if maintenance is the ultimate deciding factor in design. And yes, it matters. Your home should not feel like a burden to live in.
But I think people miss two very important things:
1. A home designed around your actual lifestyle naturally becomes lower maintenance.
Not the lifestyle you might have someday.
Not the fantasy version of yourself.
Not the “just in case” life.
A family of three buying a dining table for three or four people will use it every day. It becomes part of life. It stays clean whether it’s wood, stone, or any other material.
But when that same family permanently places a 12-seater dining table for gatherings that happen once every two months, the equation changes. Suddenly there’s unused square footage collecting dust every single day. More surface area to clean. More visual heaviness. More “temporary” things being kept there because the table is rarely fully used anyway.
And this applies to so much more than dining tables.
Oversized storage “just in case.”
Extra rooms barely touched.
Furniture bought for hypothetical situations instead of real routines.
People keep adding permanence for occasional moments, and then wonder why the home feels exhausting to maintain.
A well-designed home is not about less. It’s about alignment.
2. When you truly love your space, you naturally take care of it.
That feeling is different.
When a space reflects you (your favorite colors, textures, moods, lighting, materials) it stops feeling like “maintenance” and starts feeling personal.
You care about it deliberately.
You wipe the table because you love seeing it clean.
You arrange the cushions because the room gives you joy.
You protect the materials because the space feels emotionally valuable to you.
People often think beauty automatically means high maintenance. But sometimes, emotionally disconnected spaces become the hardest to maintain because nobody actually feels connected enough to care for them.
A home should support your life, not complicate it.
And the irony is, homes designed with genuine thought often become easier to maintain than homes designed purely out of fear, practicality, or “future-proofing” everything.
and it's not about how expensive they are