One recent Saturday afternoon, I sat on a folding chair in front of a friend’s new apartment in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Since the pandemic, she’s been performing the occasional outdoor concert, first in front of the brownstone she shared with her ex-husband, and now in front of the one she shares with her new partner. This day, she sang her song “Yellow Chair,” a story of throwing out a shitty chair her ex loved (and throwing him out too). She replaces it with a piece of furniture she thinks is too silly, too sunny, to bear. And then she finds the mood suits her. The song reminds me, after a major breakup of my own, that I repainted my (now, only my) bedroom a deep, cocoon-like grey, and then, halfway through lockdown in 2020, repainted it a bright, blank white. I moved my bed to a different wall—who knew that the simple act of reorienting a piece of furniture could help reset my attitude? With each change, I felt a little better, just like my friend did in her chair. But why?
Could these seemingly small adjustments really be causing the shift in our daily outlooks? “We never think of a spider without its web, but somehow we think humans exist without all this other stuff around us,” says Reddymade founder Suchi Reddy. At their core, the disciplines of architecture and design tackle the relationship between the order of a space and our experience of and in it. The idea that these environments have a meaningful impact on humans’ physical and mental well-being has become the thesis for neuroaesthetics, an emerging field of neuroscience of which Reddy is a researcher. Spaces either provide sensory pleasures or they don’t, she says. “That’s an emotional thing that then feeds into a deeper kind of neurological effect—and that’s absolutely influenced by space.”
Let’s be clear: It’s not a case for materialistic living, but rather how we interact with and are informed by our selected surroundings. “I take a behavioral psychology approach to thinking about space,” says Dr. Bev Walpole, clinical psychologist and founder of Haven Wellness by Design. “It’s about what individuals who will occupy a space need. It’s about how to break down the expectations of that space and what people plan to do with it.”
Which is to say, our relationships to our homes are as informed by our desires, traumas, histories, and hopes as they are by our relationships with each other. “Your home is integral to your mental health,” says Maura Trumble, a partner at CCY Architects. “It stems from Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs—the idea that a sense of safety and comfort is one of the most basic instincts we have as humans.” Like many animal species, humans developed the concept of a home as a refuge—not just a place to take care of our physical needs, but the emotional needs for privacy and freedom from danger. Those needs haven’t gone away—but are they top of mind when we’re contemplating the nuances of a floor plan and furniture layout?
“From a functional perspective,” says Inc Architecture & Design founding partner Adam Rolston, “there’s no doubt the arrangement of furniture and the organization of spaces have profound emotional and psychological effects.” These schemes can be of almost any scale: a vast, bright living room with an ample view of rolling landscapes, for example, might sound enviable. But in practice, it might make you feel sterile and alone. A cozy gathering of sofas and coffee tables might create ample space for entertaining, but in practice just offer places to bang your knee and reminders that you don’t entertain much. The color of a wall can remind you of childhood, for better or worse (much like the location of a bed could remind you of the person you used to share it with). The point is, as in mental health generally, almost everything is subjective—and the objective when positioning a room should be to pinpoint how it makes you makes you feel, and what you can do about it. “Start with what’s not working,” advises Walpole. “What are those points that cause agitation and let [you] know the space isn’t feeling so great?”
Consider it an exercise in design mindfulness: Identify the areas of your home that cause distress, then revise them. “Certain layouts can unintentionally heighten stress or discomfort,” says Rolston. He cites the overly open floor plan and its tendency to “result in increased noise and visual clutter” amid a large-scale space. For people who tend to loneliness, for instance, those echoing rooms and panoramic views might not be a comfort. “Homes that lack any quiet corner or refuge can leave occupants feeling exposed and unsettled. I call it the airport effect,” he says. Trumble concurs: “You might think you have to capture the big view, but it might help to bring the scale of the space down…. Be cognizant of the softness of the furniture, the layering of rugs, and consider acoustic treatments on the ceiling.”
Furniture plans may also be a provocateur. “You might not want a sitting area with the two big sofas miles apart from each other, which looks impressive but might make you feel exposed,” says London-based designer Nicola Harding. “Whereas with seating much closer together, everyone’s leaning in.” She also recommends considering a more forgiving layout to ease potential anxiety: “If something does not have an obvious place, then nothing can be obviously out of place.”
The process of creating intentional, authentic spaces may seem overwhelming, but the practice has precedence. The marketing field has coined the study of “choice architecture,” stating that behaviors are triggered by cues; therefore, the organization of objects in a space affects how we interact with them—in sight, in mind, so to speak. Surely, you’re familiar with one of its best-known applications: The “Make Your Bed” philosophy, said to be formalized by admiral William H. McRaven, is the idea that making a regular effort to maintain order in your visual environment can create order, peace, or a sense of accomplishment in your mind.
Walpole notes that it’s not necessarily the tidy blankets and sheets that are the point. It’s the “behavioral activation,” she says, “building momentum of little things.” While inertia is often the attendant of depression, the good news is that a fulfillment of this momentum potential can release dopamine in the brain, a kind of reward that can reinforce the behavior. Does this theory extend beyond the bedroom? And can our surroundings alone activate a desired behavior? Reddy says yes: “The foyer and those moments of transition are hugely overlooked…but they are beautiful little microsecond transitions,” she says. “It lets your body reset.” In her own apartment, she uses the entry as an ever-changing art gallery. The chance to contemplate a little beauty, however quickly, “immediately resets my entire nervous system from fight-or-flight to rest-and-digest,” she says.
This philosophy can be joined to traditional practices like feng shui, which maintains that clutter, or displeasing organizations of furniture and architectural structures, can block the flow of positive energy. Again, Walpole emphasizes the personal here. “If you’re visually stimulated, mess can derail you,” she says. For other people, a kind of creative chaos is stimulating in a positive sense. Either way, “Communicating needs within the home” is the most important thing.
Of course, none of this is meant to replace seeking help for depression. These days, however, even therapy often happens at home. The digital age has made it easier to access cognitive-behavioral therapy remotely—a treatment that was increasingly adopted during the pandemic. (In 2023, the spike in the number of empty therapist offices in Manhattan due to the rise in virtual consults made headlines.) So make space for it. “You want to be somewhere really comfortable, and probably quite small,” says Harding, “so you feel held and not exposed.”
Design is a way of picturing a new life, then creating the space for it. “There is no prescribed procession or furniture arrangement that will yield a mindful or grounding experience,” Aidlin Darling Design founding principal Joshua Aidlin reminds us. “That is the beauty of architecture.” But there is hope that an update to your home can yield a change in your mindset—even if it is simply moving a bed and adding a sunny yellow chair. “The way you change your space can change how you behave,” says Walpole. “That can change how you feel, and how you feel changes your thoughts.” Harding agrees: “If you make it easy to live in the way you want to live,” she says, “the odds are much higher that you’re going to live the life that you want to live.”
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