Why Slow Living is Good for You and Your Home Environment

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“Slow living” is no longer a novel concept. Having first appeared a decade ago as an antidote to the stress of busy daily life, it’s now established itself as a major trend. We talked to professionals in a variety of sectors — architecture, interior and garden design, ceramics and life coaching — about how they’re addressing many homeowners’ desire to slow down. They suggested ways to treasure every aspect of the experience of slowness and how you can incorporate slow living into your home.
Slow living was rediscovered — if it was ever truly lost — through the element that perhaps most unites us: food. Started by Carlo Petrini in Bra, Italy, in 1986, the Slow Food movement emphasized the necessity and beauty of a shift to a more convivial and unhurried (dining) experience.

After Petrini, English-speaking countries took the reins, theorizing the need for a return to a slower pace and linking food to other areas of life. Many authors have used the word “slow” as an acronym for Sustainable, Local, Organic and Whole.

Create a Slow Home
It’s a small step from food to lifestyle and home furnishings. Decor that’s all about a slow pace, centering on the rediscovery of traditional materials and techniques and emphasizing a close connection to nature, has been particularly visible in industry publications in recent years.
The slow home is not just about decor — it’s an entire philosophy. Australian interior designer Natalie Walton describes how you can incorporate slow living into your everyday life in her book Still: The Slow Home (published by Hardie Grant Books).

“The first and simplest way is to consume less — it’s perhaps the most important tool at our disposal. Secondly, we can also consider the idea of “localization,” a concept developed by economist Helena Norberg-Hodge,” Walton writes.

“Our homes are ideally placed to support and promote these ideas, with everything from the materials we source in construction to how we fit out and furnish them,” she writes. “The choices we make don’t have to be at the expense of creating a space that feels warm and welcoming, though. Instead, they can actually make us feel better about how and where we live.

“Thirdly,” she adds, “when we choose to connect more with nature, it becomes a bigger priority in our lives.”

Construct With Care
Many architects are responding to their clients’ desire for slow living with tailored projects. Eight years ago, Italian architect Stefano Ghiretti decided to settle down in one of his favourite regions, Salento, in Apulia, southern Italy, where he spends his time renovating traditional masseria farm complexes.

“Architecture has always been slow because, regardless of lifestyle, the conception and execution of construction processes requires slowness. The term ‘slow living’ is a somewhat commercial label today,” he says. “It is true, however, that compared to the frenetic pace of construction in certain parts of the world, slow architecture can be understood as an act of care, taking the time necessary to build one’s home out of the reusable materials onsite. In this sense, it’s the slow process of a renovation that’s not focused on profit.”

Salento is emblematic of the shift to a lifestyle withdrawn from the materialist world and the hectic pace of everyday life. “The desire for rural living is the reason behind Salento’s explosion in popularity in recent years,” Ghiretti says.
“In addition to the many requests for masseria to be used as second homes,” he continues, “lots of Italians and foreign nationals — especially from the U.K. — want to move here to transform their lives and settle down in houses that are in contact with nature, where they can have gardens, use worm composting, raise animals and enjoy the changing seasons to really connect with the earth.”
Stay Local

How does architecture respond to slow living? How can we identify the design practices that can help us slow down?

“The answer is using local models and architectural typologies, those that have always served this kind of function and lifestyle,” Ghiretti says. “It’s important to use local materials and insert salvaged elements whenever possible, while recovering the spaces that were there before and converting them to serve other functions.”

Outdoor living is another essential component. “Here, where the climate allows it, it’s important to create a very strong relationship between indoor and outdoor spaces, maximizing contact with nature so that 50% to 60% of your time is spent outdoors.”

Grow and Nurture
Slow living is therefore intimately connected with the yearning for greenery and nature, which gets lost in cities, where nature is often scarce and lifestyles are accelerated.

Can plant care be a secret weapon for finding a slower pace? That’s what we asked Elisabetta Cavrini who — along with her husband, Michele — runs Gardenstudio, a Bologna, Italy-based business specializing in terrace and garden design.

For Cavrini, experiencing greenery takes perseverance. Plant care yields results only over time — which every living organism needs to grow. “You get the greatest benefit from greenery not when you surround yourself with it, but when you take part in its growth. Not everyone experiences the innate pleasure of living with and caring for plants. It’s something very personal, which only takes shape over time.”

This is why she suggests that skeptics try growing just one plant in a pot. Cultivating and seeing a plant grow is an experience that can have surprising effects even on the biggest doubters. “Trying to grow a plant, having an active hand in its development, concentrating on it and understanding its development allows you to align with the rhythm of nature: today I sow, tomorrow I water and only after that will the plant germinate,” Cavrini says.

“There’s value in seeing something that grows with your care or perishes because you don’t understand it or haven’t done enough. In nature, as in life, not everything is always successful, so taking care of something green allows you to understand instability.”

Connect With Others
“We also underscore that caring for nature brings about a result that’s not only personal but collective,” Cavrini says. “It’s an added environmental value for the city, a beautiful thing for those who see it. In a sense, growing plants is an act of great generosity.”

We asked if she had any advice on how to get started. The answer? Taking your time. “It’s better not to go over your head; always start with a comfortable, easy project, so you can have continuity and see the results over time,” she says.

Listen to Yourself
Born and raised in Paris, but now based in the hills of Florence, Italy, Sandrine Kom is a Slow Life coach. She created this speciality by linking the themes that have always interested her both privately and professionally. At the heart of her practice are authenticity — the importance of listening to that inner voice that all too often gets pushed aside— and the rediscovery of full quality of life.

“I’m a nutrition coach,” Kom says. “Over the course of my professional career, I realized that people who came to me were using food as comfort, to respond to their chronic lack of time for living and listening to themselves. It was this observation that gave rise to my vision for a form of coaching dedicated to slow living. I practice it in combination with ‘slow-living yoga,’ a very slow style of yoga that allows us to get back in touch with all the messages our body sends us continuously, but which we never want to listen to.”

For Kom, slowness became a way to put the things that are really important back into focus and address neglected needs, like the need for rest. “We’ve been raised to be very violent with ourselves, to do everything quickly, to feel guilty if we waste time and aren’t productive. Slowing down is a way of focusing on calm and concentration, an attitude that’s necessary in order to keep up with the intense rhythm of our everyday lives.”

We asked her to share her vision of a slow home and a slow approach to living. “The house is our nest, a sacred place, especially because not everyone has one, and that’s a fact we often take for granted because we were born into the right part of the world,” she says. “We have to take care of this house, not so we can show it off at its best to our guests, but because the act of cleaning and tidying it are synonymous with taking care of ourselves.
“I really like simplicity and common sense, which can be developed in small adjustments,” she says. “First of all, many people sit at tables with the wrong kind of light, which detracts from the enjoyment of what they are eating, or perhaps at a table that’s too high or on a chair they sink into. These are all elements that create disharmony. Contact with natural materials, primarily wood, is very important. I like to use straw baskets in the fridge, they relax me and inspire me to cook.”

She recommends a small practice to regain a sense of well-being and harmony with our natural rhythms. “Walking around barefoot, or in socks in winter, is, in my opinion, a form of nourishment that allows one to immediately have better posture and be more aware,” she says.

Provence, France-based ceramic artist Florence Pauliac agrees with the need to escape the hectic pace of the world. “Slowness is not a quality valued by our society. Starting in childhood, we have to respond to deadlines imposed by external pressures without our individual pace being taking into account. Slowness, on the other hand, offers the opportunity to go deeper over time, to dwell on the details, to go back and let each aspect of a project ripen.”
The name of her workshop, Slow Ceramic Studio, reflects her desire to rediscover time. “I wanted the name of my atelier to reflect my perception of the world, which is based on slow living,” she says. “In my work, this translates into pieces that respect my rhythm of life and that of the seasons, which leaves me time to pet my cat and look at my garden. What I make in my workshop reflects these elements.”
Pauliac believes that making ceramics is an excellent way to approach slow living. “First of all, there’s a whole series of steps inherent in making ceramics — modeling, drying the pieces, first firing, surface processing, glazing, second firing and so on,” she says.
“I made a choice: to produce little and do it slowly. Each piece I make is unique. The stages of its creation follow one another into my full awareness, while I leave room for the unexpected,” she says. “Taking my time allows me to create something deep, with renewed meaning.”