My Hygge Home: A Review, and a Confession

I was lucky to encounter the idea of hygge (pronounced “hoo-gah”) while experiencing it. It was my first visit to Denmark, right after the pandemic, and we were staying with the family that had hosted my wife as a high school senior more than 40 years earlier. As an Indian American, I have always been proud of Indian hospitality — and I brag about it at every opportunity — but what I experienced in Denmark very nearly dislodged it from its pedestal.

Freshly baked bread every morning, coming out of the oven right in front of your eyes; every meal made from scratch; endless conversations around the dining table; family members taking turns at the piano, playing jazz or classical, while tea, coffee, and wine flowed freely. Candles and cut flowers from the garden outside added to the magic.

“We call this hygge,” our hosts explained. “Anything that feels nice and cozy can be described as hygge,” another added. We were taken to a café where we drank tea and ate cake. This, too, was hygge, we were told. By the end of the trip I was a true believer, and I quickly became a rabid hygge evangelist. Back home, we started selling books on hygge — and cake with our tea!

The most recent addition to our hygge shelf is My Hygge Home by Meik Wiking. Wiking is perhaps the biggest evangelist of hygge to date, thanks especially to his best-selling The Little Book of Hygge, which we have carried in our tea store for several years now. Wiking is also the founder of the Happiness Research Institute, which studies the different ways in which individuals and communities can foster happiness.

In My Hygge Home, Wiking offers many practical ideas for bringing more hygge into your home. Beyond suggestions for improving the physical space you live in, his focus on how to use that space for quality time with friends and family is especially helpful. One of the ailments of modern living is isolation. People are busy and too tired to socialize; the idea of hosting a dinner for friends can feel like climbing a minor Himalayan peak.

Just give yourself the goal of hosting one dinner a month, Wiking suggests, and see how fulfilled you feel. I can’t get the frayed poster of the Swiss Alps out of my mind — the one hanging in a greasy momo joint in Darjeeling, India, that read, “Count your success by the number of friends.”

There are also practical suggestions for stretching out family dinner time. We have a teenager who does not appreciate being questioned about how his day went. He gobbles his dinner in silence and, usually in under six minutes, asks to be excused. So the idea of making your own spring rolls from fillings spread across the dining table strikes me as clever.

Hygge can also be created at the community level, by designing neighborhoods in ways that encourage interaction among residents — more common spaces, whether parks outside or shared rooms inside buildings where residents can gather. One measure of community-level hygge, Wiking notes, is how often neighbors borrow tools from one another.

The planning of Copenhagen’s expansion in the 1940s, in the shape of five fingers, makes for an interesting study. Housing was developed along the “fingers,” while forests and parks were preserved in the spaces between, ensuring that residents were never far from nature — the ultimate source of hygge.

There is another interesting story about how one of the longest thoroughfares in the heart of Copenhagen was converted into a pedestrian-only street. When the plan was first proposed in the 1960s, business owners were up in arms, and the mayor even received death threats. Eventually, everyone agreed to a six-month trial period. The experiment was such a success that today Strøget is one of the longest and most famous pedestrianized stretches in Europe.

What stays with me from My Hygge Home is that hygge is not really about candles or throws, though Wiking is happy to talk about both. It is about making room for other people — at your table, on your street, in your city — and then lingering there a while. That is, come to think of it, what a pot of tea has always been for. Pick up the book, put the kettle on, and invite someone over. One dinner a month. Count your success by the number of friends.