This Ridgefield Designer Just Wants You To Feel Comfortable

RIDGEFIELD, CT — Since we're all spending much more time in our homes and apartments, over the past year and for the foreseeable future, we're all spending much more time thinking about interior design.

We may not call it that. For many of us, it's just giving in to an itch that has long been in need of scratching. But whether we have been putting up partitions or knocking down walls, the coronavirus pandemic has forced everyone to gaze upon their living/working arrangements with a new, critical eye.

"Today we are using more of our home, as well as spending more time in it," explained Ridgefield designer Maria Flynn. She said that Americans struggling with staying home during the New Normal can learn a lot from people in Denmark, who count themselves lucky to see seven hours of sunlight a day during their unforgiving winters.

That's made them world champions at hunkering down. Their more-laid-back and aesthetics-centered lifestyle has a name: hygge. Perhaps it should come as no surprise that it does not translate easily into American English, but most sources propose something along the lines of "cozy."

"I find it means a lot more than that," Flynn said. "It invokes a feeling of contentment and well-being."

"The Danish people embrace the winter, instead of enduring it," she explained, and hygge is one of the primary weapons in their arsenal for keeping the gloom away. Flynn said she had been living a hygge lifestyle for years and didn't realize it, and has now made it her core design tenet.

With her new business Hygge Home Living, Flynn "declutters, organizes and refreshes" her clients' homes in the centuries-old Scandinavian style. She said that despite — or perhaps, because of — the pandemic, her business has been steady since she first hung out a shingle in October 2019.

Getting the business established at the height of the pandemic presented its own set of challenges, none of them pretty nor uncluttered.

"It was a big learning curve," Flynn told Patch. She advises others bitten by the small business start-up bug to be prepared to devote a lot of time and research to creating the website, forming the limited liability corporation, and managing the social media. She said she found the SCORE program hosted at the Ridgefield Library to be very helpful.

Before going into business for herself, Flynn was a teacher, and later a stay-at-home mom. It was during that time she discovered her love of design, she said.

Flynn has embraced hygge in part because of its adaptability. The spaces she creates are not cookie cutter, but take into consideration and incorporate her clients' unique lifestyles, needs, and aesthetics, while still remaining authentically Danish hygge.

Flynn contrasted the Scandinavian style with feng shui, the ancient Japanese system of geomancy popular among designers for creating a harmonious environment.

Hygge is "authentic to you ... something you create" Flynn said, and described feng shui as a set of rules, "something you learn how to do."

Unlike many sociologists who can't see American workers returning to their cubicles when the coronavirus restrictions are lifted, Flynn predicts the work experience post-pandemic will be a "hybrid" of office and home.

"People are going to realize we don't have to do what we did, and be just as successful."