Ensuring your home smells pleasant is crucial for how others perceive your space, as scent plays a significant role in interior design. With decades of experience, your favorite HGTV stars have mastered the art of keeping things fresh. While there are many simple cleaning hacks to maintain tidiness, scent is a tricky aspect to manage consistently.
It’s easy to become accustomed to pet odors, and musty smells can quickly arise from dirty laundry or wet shoes. The beauty of these scent tips is that they don’t merely mask bad odors; instead, they’re used to keep homes fresh and welcoming. Some options literally clear the air, while others add color and personality to your space, creating a happier environment. Whether you’re hosting guests or simply want your home to be your personal sanctuary, these HGTV-approved tips are a straightforward way to enhance your space.
Genevieve Gorder uses dried herbs and flowers
Genevieve Gorder, an original designer of “Trading Spaces,” knows how crucial scent is to styling a successful space. With over 20 years of experience, she understands that scent is essential. “Every single sense needs to be addressed for us to consciously let go … Scent is one that you have to acknowledge in the very beginning, just like light,” she shared with NBC News. “Think about some of your favorite spaces in life; there’s usually a scent that you can attribute to it as well,” she explained.
Gorder uses a classic approach: Dried herbs and flowers. “I think it’s about entertaining the nose with a lot of beautiful scents: oils, dried herbs, and flowers, soaps, all of these things take you to a different place like this as soon as you walk in the door,” she told The Design Network on YouTube. Old-school methods are great ways to keep your home fresh, so consider options like dried potpourri. You can purchase pre-made options, such as the Qingbei Rina Summer Potpourri Bags, or create your own. Matching scents to the seasons is a great way to go the extra mile, like using cinnamon in the fall and florals in the spring.
Jeremiah Brent has buckets of potpourri in his home
Jeremiah Brent is also a potpourri fan. “I’ve been placing handfuls of potpourri in small bowls around the house for years to keep things warm and inviting,” he told Domino. He also shared his love for the material on Instagram. “My secret for creating sanctuary in home — buckets & buckets (more like bowls and bowls) of Santa Maria potpourri,” he wrote.
Brent’s recommended company, Santa Maria, offers various options to enhance your space, depending on your budget and preferred aesthetic. You might choose the classic potpourri box if you already have a display option in mind and just need the petals. However, the site also sells terracotta jars to store your mix, just in case. If you don’t prefer the loose-leaf option (perhaps because you have children or a curious cat who tends to knock open containers), but still love this classic scent, there is even an option to purchase a potpourri candle or room fragrance diffuser.
Joanna Gaines uses simmer pots
If dried potpourri isn’t your preference, or you want to change your scent more frequently, then the Joanna Gaines simmer pot might be for you. “A simmer pot is essentially a stovetop potpourri,” she wrote on her Magnolia blog. “I love the ease of throwing these ingredients into a pot of water and letting it fill our house with clean scents all day long.” Her ingredients list for a summer simmer pot includes fresh rosemary, dried lavender, and lemon slices, plus a few drops of both lavender and rose essential oil. You can order both together in sets like Yethious 2-Pack of Essential Oils. When mixed with a few cups of water and brought to a simmer, the smells it emits are heavenly.
However, it’s easy to swap out a few ingredients to suit your preferences. Maybe you prefer the sharp kick of orange to lemon, and lavender gives you a headache, so you want to use eucalyptus instead. During the winter, you can add things like cranberries or pine essential oil for a holiday twist. Yet no matter the time of year, mix and match ingredients to find your favorites. That said, a simmer pot is never a set-and-forget scent solution. Keep an eye on it (and the heat on low!), adding water as needed so it doesn’t burn dry.
Vern Yip uses wax melts
Vern Yip, the “Design Star” judge, agrees with Gorder about the importance of scent in a space. “It’s huge. Most people don’t think about it because you don’t really get to smell the rooms in the pretty design books,” he told Mpls. St. Paul Magazine. “It’s really important from a design standpoint that it’s making you feel the way that you want to feel when you walk into your home.” He encourages clients to use wax melts to achieve this.
Most melts come in larger blocks but typically have smaller bricks that you can break off. It’s best to burn only one or two at a time, so it’s easier to switch to a new scent when desired. Yip enjoys changing his melts. “I change mine up depending on the season,” he said. “We’re in fall right now, and I just changed from one of my favorite scents, White Sands, to Sandalwood. It’s another part of my seasonal rotation of pillows and throws.” When changing, it’s easiest to let the wax melt completely, then carefully soak it up with a paper towel or pour it into a trash bag. Never pour it down the sink or into the toilet, as it will re-harden and can clog pipes. While Yip’s specific melts are no longer widely available, Better Homes & Gardens Mahogany & Sandalwood Melts are a great alternative.
Jasmine Roth loves swapping out candles
Candles are a timeless way to keep your home smelling great, and HGTV star Jasmine Roth is a fan. She uses candles to set the scene, keeping things fresh. “Refresh your space with a new scent,” she advised on her blog about updating your home for personal enjoyment or guest entertainment. “There’s nothing like lighting a fresh candle to give a room a bit of ambiance.”
Regularly swapping out scents keeps your space feeling curated and updated. Roth mentions that one of her favorites is a cardamom candle, similar to Viva Workshop Store’s Cardamom & Cream Natural Soy Wax Scented Candle, but you can choose the scent that resonates with you. In larger spaces, burn more than one candle at once to create a layered scent. While they don’t need to be identical, they should be complementary, like butterscotch and coffee, or different floral scents.
The Property Brothers recommend closing off smellier places
For areas in your home prone to frequent odors, the Property Brothers suggest creating a physical boundary to keep the smell contained. During the “Cheer-Tastic Design” episode of “Property Brothers,” the downstairs half-bath had a door that nearly opened right into the kitchen, a recipe for disaster as the two places have smells that should never mix. To resolve this, the team moved the door to the other end of the bathroom, ensuring it opened into an adjoining hallway instead.
This wasn’t the only time the brothers employed this type of intervention. In the “Hammer, Hammer, Pedal, Pedal” episode of “Property Brothers: Forever Home,” they added barn doors to an open room primarily used for exercise. “I love it. … That’s going to keep the sound in there and the smell from the kids in there as well,” the client said during the big reveal. If you have the budget for a minor renovation, containing bad smells with physical boundaries is a great approach. Plus, in this case, building a sliding barn door is an easy DIY that can have long-term positive effects on your home’s overall atmosphere.
Egypt Sherrod uses PlugIns to make an impression
For a quick improvement in room scent, reach for a PlugIn like Egypt Sherrod. She told The Spruce that it’s one of her favorite methods to make her home more inviting, placing one right behind the front door to greet anyone with a welcoming scent. However, if there’s no outlet available, setting one up in your entryway or adjacent living room works similarly. To start your journey, purchase a full kit that comes with the shell, like the Glade PlugIns Air Freshener Starter Kit. From there, you can swap out the scent as you please, as the brand also offers refills without a shell.
Sherrod suggests discovering your favorite aromas at the flower shop to create your own signature home scent. That way, you can determine which specific flowers you’re drawn to. “Go into a store, lift different ones up to smell, and create combinations that make you feel really good,” she told the outlet. Then, you can use a combination of fresh flowers and floral-scented plug-ins to create a whole home aroma.
Emily Henderson reaches for fresh-cut flowers
There’s nothing as classically sweet-smelling as a bouquet of flowers. For Emily Henderson, this tried-and-true classic has long been one of her go-tos for refreshing a space. Her reasoning is that fresh flowers tend to be subtle; you can smell them, but only in the surrounding area. Some other options, she thinks, might overwhelm a space. “Now, be forewarned that there is a fine line to how much we actually want to smell when we walk into your home. Less is more in this case,” she wrote for her blog, Style by Emily Henderson. “You never want to get blasted with a smell as soon as you open the door, just a subtle undertone of a scent is much more pleasing and manageable.”
If you’re concerned about the cost of constantly buying bouquets of fresh-cut flowers, consider planting a few bushes with fragrant flowers in your yard. This way, you’ll have constant access to blooms to bring inside when your space needs a sweet scent. “Fresh-cut flowers are obviously my favorite way to bring in a pretty smell, with some of our fragrant favorites being jasmine, lilac, and peonies,” Henderson continued. Other options include all colors of roses, rhododendrons, and even magnolias. Consider saving the petals for potpourri or simmer pots to maximize the flowers in all stages.
Bobby Berk loves candles (as long as they don’t smell like food)
Candles are a classic, but “Queer Eye’s” Bobby Berk advises against those with food scents. “I’m not a big fan of home scents that smell like food,” he told Page Six. “I don’t need my house to smell like sugar cookies, because then it just makes me want to eat sugar cookies, and that’s not healthy for anyone on a daily basis.” For some, Berk included, food-related scents not only induce cravings but can make a space feel too sweet and heavy instead of light and fresh.
To avoid causing dessert cravings (likely also triggered by apple pie, chocolate brownie, and other sugary scents), Berk tends to reach for herbaceous or spiced scents instead. “Bohéme [brand] candles are the best. Any candle that has any wood scent in it, like cedar or sandalwood or oak … those are my absolute favorite home scents,” he told the outlet. Boheme Wanderlust Jar Candle has notes of bergamot and cardamom, while the Maison Louis Marie – No.04 Bois de Balincourt features cedar and sandalwood, just as Berk suggests.
Emily Henderson also swears by making her own chicken broth
While Berk might not favor artificial food smells in his home, Henderson can’t get enough of the real deal. She swears that making her own chicken broth is a great hack for keeping your house smelling delicious and inviting, as the scent tends to linger for at least a day after you’re done cooking it. “One of the added benefits is that it makes your house smell so good for a full day,” she shared on her blog. “I’m not sure anything smells better or more homey than roasted chicken.”
While she doesn’t recommend a specific broth recipe, she does say that she loves using Clean Soups: Simple, Nourishing Recipes for Health and Vitality, which offers plenty to choose from. Even if you’re not the best cook, she promises they are easy. She also considers the scent one of her signature things and hopes that her children will associate the smell with home. This could easily become a nice home tradition for you to start, too.
Tiffany Brooks makes her own DIY linen spray
Sometimes spaces just need a little spritz to smell their best. This is why “Design Star” winner Tiffany Brooks makes her own DIY linen spray to keep her home smelling clean. “I make my own air freshener by filling an 8-ounce spray bottle with water, mixing in a couple of drops of rubbing alcohol, and then adding 10 to 20 drops of an essential oil,” she told Today. “I shake the bottle and then get to work spraying my sofas, pillows, curtains, closets, and bathrooms so that everything smells great.”
To recreate the hack at home, grab ljdeals 8 oz Clear Plastic Spray Bottles, which come in a pack of two. This way, you can alternate scents, depending on your mood. If you aren’t sure which essential oil to choose, consider buying a pack, like the Cliganic Organic Essential Oils Set. It has peppermint, lavender, eucalyptus, lemongrass, and orange, so you don’t have to pick a favorite before buying — you can test them all out. And don’t forget the alcohol, which is what’s really doing the heavy lifting here. It works to dehydrate bacteria’s cells.
Mike Holmes installed air cleaners to eliminate odors in his home
For a space to smell its best, it needs to be clean. To achieve this, Mike Holmes recommends the Panasonic WhisperAir Air Purifier. This permanent fixture is a purifier that doesn’t use filters, making it virtually maintenance-free as it works to pull the stink right out of your home. He shared on his YouTube channel, “It’s a constant interior cleaner, is what it is. It will pull the smells off your body, off the carpet, from cooking. It will constantly do this!”
If you’re concerned about the purifier increasing your electricity bill, Holmes told viewers that the appliance only uses about four watts of power, meaning it consumes very little energy to do its job. Each unit can cover about 250 square feet of space, so you might need to purchase more than one for optimal results. The Canadian contractor even shared that he personally has four in his home, placed in his living room, dining room, and kitchen. It’s also noted that installing a purifier where your pet sleeps or where your cat’s litter box is can significantly contribute to keeping your home smelling fresh. If you don’t want a permanent solution, LEVOIT Air Purifiers for Bedroom Home is a great temporary option.
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