Brought to you by
February 2026
Tori McGee, Holistic REALTOR®
Roses
The One Ritual Your Home Is Missing
How Hygge Principles Create a Healthier Home
Science-Backed Ways to Support Wellness
Designing with LOVE
Pet-Friendly Homes for Comfort and Connection
Compliments of
Tori McGee, Holistic REALTOR®
Tori McGee
Holistic Realtor®
The Good Neighbor Podcast
February invites us to think about love in a broader, more meaningful way—how it shows up in the spaces we live in every day. Our homes quietly shape our relationships, routines, and sense of well-being, from the people we share them with to the pets that bring comfort and connection.
Explore what it means to design and care for a home with intention. From heart-centered design and pet-friendly spaces to smarter ways to understand how your home performs, these stories focus on creating environments that truly support the life happening inside them.
Because when a home is designed with care, it becomes more than a place to live—it becomes a place to reconnect, restore, and love where you live again.
Recipe of the Month
Grilled Honey Lime Mango Glazed Shrimp
Heather Christo, Deliciously Allergen Free Recipes
While this is easy and fast enough for a week night, to me that it makes it all the more appealing for entertaining! You can make the sauce ahead of time, and then you just throw em on the Barbie for a few minutes and voila!
Photo Credit: Heather Christo
Organization
How to Design a Home Around the People You Love
By Jolene Nannette
Designing spaces in your home to foster a sense of connection just takes a little bit of planning and organizing. And it’s very worthwhile. Here are a few things you can do to make your home more open to encouraging close relationships with the people you care about.
Feng Shui Essentials
Where Love Lives: Designing a Heart-Centered Home
By Dee Oujiri
Love is often spoken of as an emotion, but it is also an environment. It lives not only in what we feel toward others, but in the way we inhabit space, tend to it, and allow it to reflect who we are becoming. If the home is the first architecture we ever encounter, then it is also the first architecture that teaches us how to belong to ourselves, to each other, and to the quiet inner worlds we rarely name.
Featured Article
Healthy Home Realty with Tori
Staff Writer
Check out my interview on The Good Neighbor Podcast! 🏡
Here are the details:
Starting out as a nutrition specialist in 2008, I never intended to become a real estate agent. But in 2003, I made a conscious decision to remove all chemicals from my family’s life after my young daughter was diagnosed with ADHD.
From that point, my mission was to do whatever I could to help my daughter.
When I began to look for a home to buy in 2013, I quickly realized there was a need for holistic real estate agents.
“No one really cared,” she says. Most traditional real estate agents acted like mold and other toxins were no big deal…
In 2015, I received my Realtor’s license and felt the need to create wellness for homes.
I am a certified Building Biology Advocate & am very excited to use the knowledge and skills I’ve learned to educate others in this increasingly vital area of public health and well-being.
I believe real estate is the next frontier that will be radically transformed by the wellness movement. Our homes, communities and surrounding environment directly affect our daily behaviors and lifestyles, and together these determine up to 80–90 percent of our health outcomes. Since our homes are typically our most important personal investment and expenditure, it is only logical that they should also be an investment in our health and well-being.
2026 Home Trends
Designing with LOVE: Pet-Friendly Homes for Comfort and Connection
By Cassy West
February is often associated with love — romantic love, yes — but also the quieter, deeper kind of love we feel for the place we call home and for those who share it with us. Our homes are not just shelters; they are emotional ecosystems. And for many of us, that ecosystem includes pets who bring companionship, comfort, and unconditional love into our daily lives.
Wellness Real Estate
The Smart Homeowner’s Winter-to-Spring Transition Plan: 4 High-Impact Moves to Protect Your Investment
By Sheila Alston
Your home is more than a shelter—it’s a system. And right now, that system is under pressure. Shifting from winter to spring isn’t just about packing up coats or refreshing your decor. It’s about getting strategic—handling the hidden wear-and-tear that quietly builds up each season. Whether you’re in snowy Minnesota or sunny Texas, these four early-season priorities will help you maximize comfort, reduce long-term costs, and protect your home’s market value in a competitive real estate environment.When most people shop for a home, they think about location, layout, and finishes. But what if the most important factor isn’t something you can see?
Wellness Upgrades
See the Whole Picture: A New Way to Understand How Your Home Performs
By Lucy Chatman
When you walk through a home, you notice the kitchen, the layout, maybe even the flooring. But what about the stuff you can’t see—like how well the home stays warm in winter, how healthy the air is inside, or how efficiently it uses energy? Thanks to a groundbreaking new tool featured in Green Builder Media, everyday homeowners now have access to this kind of powerful performance data—not just builders and energy pros.
Healthy Home
How Hygge Principles Create a Healthier Home: Science-Backed Ways to Support Wellness
Long before I knew the word “hygge,” I was drawn to the concepts it represents. Growing up with Norwegian roots, I’d always loved the simplistic style paired with cozy, comforting elements. Clean lines. Natural materials. Spaces that felt both intentional and welcoming. In Minnesota, you can’t throw a stone without hitting a Scandinavian shop filled with wool blankets, wooden bowls, and that unmistakable aesthetic of warmth and simplicity.
Healthy Home
Love Where You Live (Again): 5 Intelligent Ways to Reconnect With Your Home in 2026
By, Lucy Chatman
After a long winter indoors, it’s easy to start seeing flaws instead of charm in your home. But before you start browsing Zillow out of restlessness, consider this: falling back in love with your space might be more about shifting your environment than your address.
Architecture
Why Solar Panels Won’t Fix A Poorly Designed House
By Kate Hamblet
When people picture a sustainable home, they often imagine solar panels covering the roof. Solar panels are visible, exciting, and easy to understand—so it’s no surprise they’re usually the first thing homeowners think about. But solar panels should actually be the last step! Not the first one.
