Just minutes before she was to join a girlfriend for dinner the other night, Jackie Smythe joked the sole purpose for giving birth to two daughters was just so they'd one day decorate her newest home.

“That's why I went through all that pain to have them,” she said with a twinkle in her eye and a hearty laugh. “Thank goodness I didn't stop with one.”

At 82, Smythe, a resident of Sunrise at Ivey Ridge, a senior living facility in Johns Creek, Ga., is among a growing number of seniors who find themselves with large houses but no children at home to fill the rooms. And so they find themselves tackling the rather huge job of downsizing their living spaces.

Smythe's daughters recently turned her new one-bedroom, one-bath suite into a home using a mix of personal treasures and recently purchased items that were at once pretty and functional, a tip they gleaned from HGTV designer and host Emily Henderson.

Through a partnership Sunrise Senior Living has with Henderson, who is celebrated for her ability to make spaces feel like home, residents and their families can get help making the transition from a large home to apartment-style living without sacrificing their personal style and interests.

“A Sunrise principle of service is to celebrate the individuality of every resident, and that is exactly what I try to do as a designer,” Henderson said. “When someone walks into your room, it should feel like you.”

Henderson, founder of StylebyEmilyHenderson.com, a daily style blog, said creating spaces to match a client's personality is her forte.

As part of the Sunrise partnership, she provided a Comforts of Home Design Guide the family or their loved ones can use as a reference. That includes everything from safety ideas to specific products they can buy.

“I would imagine it's really hard knowing what to keep and what to throw or give away when you're downsizing after decades of accumulating things,” she said.

Her main rule for getting it done?

Make sure an object or piece is beautiful, functional or sentimental.

“If you have a lot of stuff, then try and have an object meet at least two of those criteria,” Henderson said.

HGTV designer and host Emily Henderson’s top design tips:• Buy multifunctional pieces such as cocktail tables that can be stools, and ottomans that can hold storage.• Don’t have too many contrasting colors, because it makes the room busier and smaller.• Keep the clutter down. Nothing makes a space look smaller than a bunch of random knickknacks on surfaces.• Use your wall space. If you don’t have a ton of other areas for accessories, don’t forget that you can hang objects that you love in shadow boxes as art on the walls.• Consider round or oval furniture to keep the flow more open and airy.