Come As You Are: The Secret to Great Hospitality

We’re thrilled to have Myquillyn Smith sharing the secret to great hospitality in this excerpt from her new book, Welcome Home: A Cozy Minimalist Guide to Decorating and Hosting All Year Round (Zondervan).

It’s the same in every episode of House Hunters. First comes the not-at-all funny joke about how the wife gets the big closet and the husband will take the micro linen closet in the hall. Then the couple goes on and on about how important it is for them to “entertain.” They entertain a lot, so they need a big dining room; they love to entertain, so they need a fun back yard; they’ve got to have a finished basement because, entertainers. And the show always ends as the couple is slicing cheese and clinking wine glasses with a bunch of friends who look at them and their newly purchased house with admiration.

That’s when I look around at the fixer-upper we’ve lived in for seven years and realize we’ve never clinked wine glasses over a dining room table filled with assorted cheeses as we entertained admiring friends. I also wonder how often those house hunters entertained friends after the TV crew left town.

We all move into our homes with great intentions to entertain. But entertaining can also feel daunting and grown up and fancy and reserved for people with accents and ascots and maybe yachts. I show off and you sit back and watch, which means the pressure is on me. To entertain means I need to have it all together. Entertaining is all about what I can present to you, and the tricks I can come up with to keep your attention and your admiration.

But here’s the thing. For most of us, it’s not really entertaining we care about. What we really crave and hope to provide in our homes is hospitality. Hospitality feels welcoming, warm, simple, and as is. It’s about mutual receiving. Hosts receive guests into their homes, guests receive care, and both receive connection. Hospitality is grace with throw pillows.

Entertaining is about the host, but hospitality is about the guest. This makes all the difference for us regular folk, because if we have to wait around until things are perfect to invite anyone over, we’ll never do it. But if we choose to make hospitality a priority, we can start right now with whatever we have.

Come as you are, and I’ll meet you as I am.

I one hundred percent believe you can invite people over tonight and not even care about the state of your house. You can serve your guests whatever meat will expire tomorrow and have a meaningful, wonderful, great time. I also believe you can throw an elaborate dinner party in which every detail has been thoughtfully prepared, and do it all in the name of connecting with your guests so they feel honored and loved.

Most of us are looking for something between the last-minute invitation and the fancy dinner. We want our homes to be in a functioning state so it’s hospitality ready. The truth is, we won’t invite anyone over if we hate the way our houses look. We might feel guilty about it, but we still won’t do it. We also want our guests to feel thought of, cared for, and connected with, and we want to easily fit hospitality into our already full lives. We want to be the one who volunteers her home for gatherings and who has just enough of a plan with just enough freedom that doing so doesn’t stress her out.

So how do we do that? We start by shifting our mindset.

Becoming an imperfectionist—being able to see the benefits of not trying to be perfect or pretending things are perfect—is the first step to becoming a gracious, others-focused host. Once we realize that we can partner with our imperfections to help us connect with others, it not only changes how we view hospitality, it also changes how we prep our houses. When we believe things don’t have to be perfect to be beautiful, the pressure is off. Embracing imperfections and being content with where we are is a great first step to creating the homes we’ve always wanted so we can use them the way we’ve always dreamed. But just because we know perfection isn’t the goal doesn’t mean we don’t also need beauty and function.

Most of us aren’t trying to make our homes look pretty so our neighbors will be jealous. We want to love our homes so we can use them. We want our homes to look lovely so we can stop thinking about them already. And one simple way we can have homes that look beautiful, fresh, and inviting year round is by incorporating seasonal touches without going overboard. This is your invitation to create some seasonal rhythms of change in your home so it’s always ready to welcome you, your family, and your friends.

Myquillyn Smith is a self-taught, design school dropout who took a week-long course so she could be a certified home stager and redesigner. She and her family have lived in 13 different houses, apartments, and condos and spent plenty of time getting real-world design experience. Millions of women have been inspired by Myquillyn’s blog, The Nesting Place, and her home has been featured in Better Homes & Gardens, Ladies’ Home Journal, Cottages and Bungalows, and the Charlotte Observer. Christianity Today named her one of 20 Creative Innovators of 2016. She is the author of The Nesting Place: It Doesn’t Have to Be Perfect to Be Beautiful and Cozy Minimalist Home: More Style, Less Stuff. You can find Myquillyn online at The Nester.

Photograph © Brooke Lark, used with permission