I was a grumpy client at the time of my enlightenment. I had been told by the executives who controlled my professional destiny to use all I’d learned in life and at school to develop retail spaces that encouraged sales, aligned with our brand…that basically ensured a prosperous and early-retired future for us all. But the thing was, I had no idea what to do. I didn’t know which of the options that eager design teams were presenting I should OK.
So, I bluffed. Sometimes this worked much more successfully than other times—and sometimes not at all. These sometimes-not-at-all situations had the potential to have a negative effect on my earning power, so I resolved to cut out any design-related guesswork.
In my undergraduate days, I’d been exposed to enough science to think that there might be some sort of rigorously derived knowledge that could and should guide my decision-making. True to the training I’d received as a daughter of a librarian, I hunted for just such information until I found the science of environmental psychology.
Then I relaxed.
Environmental psychologists had investigated many of the issues that I needed to resolve, and applying their research findings made me look like a genius.
I was no longer a grumpy client.
To bolster my knowledge, I went back to school to study environmental psychology in a thorough, organized way. I now have lots of experience applying the science of environmental psychology in everyday settings.
My work as an environmental psychologist now takes me around the world, applying the science of environmental psychology and conducting studies myself. I use research-based insights to help organizations develop workplaces that boost professional performance and healthcare facilities whose aesthetics promote swifter healing. Retailers hire me to help create spaces that encourage sales, and academic organizations bring me in to inform the design of spaces where students learn best. Realtors have employed me to teach them how to stage homes that sell quickly for excellent prices. I work with individual homeowners to evolve current spaces or develop new ones, applying at their houses the same scientific principles that make such a difference in commercial, health care, academic, sales, and other environments.
You might call me a design shrink.
Environmental psychology is based in rigorous scientific research, not hunches. All the material in this book is drawn from carefully conducted studies, sometimes in laboratories, sometimes outside them. The way the research we’ll cover was done means you can be confident using it to make design decisions.
As I discuss my own home redesign in the pages that follow, I’ll be very briefly reviewing research findings that will be covered more thoroughly in the next chapters.
My House
Ten years ago, my husband and I bought a house for the value of the lot it stands on—the real estate equivalent of having the building thrown in for nothing. This really wasn’t the bargain it might seem to be: homes that are pleasant places to live are not provided free of charge.
The reason most people give for buying a wreck is so they can create just the sort of home they want to live in. If you’re ripping the walls down to the studs, you certainly aren’t going to have to learn to live with many of the kitchen design choices previous owners have made—ditto for their living room wallpaper and master bathroom tile choices. We liked the idea of having a place tailored to our needs and desires and were also motivated to buy our house because it was inexpensive—in our part of the country, homes we want to live in cost more than we want to pay for them, if they’re in good shape. The idea of eventually living in the sort of home we coveted was a motivator that keeps us scraping, grouting, and painting whenever we get tired of DIY-ing—which is often. We also both like the fact that we’d never seen a house before that looked like our home—it even came with a gargoyle already nestled in the brickwork at the roofline.
I am my own client when rehabbing my current home, but unlike doing surgery on yourself, being your own environmental psychologist can end well. Fixing up my own new home has shown me again how much more pleasant it is to live in a home that meshes with my personality and that applies research done by environmental psychologists. My significant other would agree, even though he’s sometimes cranky because the most appropriate ways to refurbish a home are not necessarily the easiest and least expensive options.
The first crisis that confronted us in our new house was that many of its interior spaces were not daylit—ever.
Sunlight is a magical elixir.
Sunlight is a magic elixir for humans, and the home renovations and/or modifications that earn the biggest psychological returns on investment bring natural light into a space. I wanted the mood and cognitive performance boosts that numerous studies have linked to daylit interiors. I took down curtains and had interior walls eliminated to get natural light flowing throughout my home. I added windows and had heavy railings removed from one stairway because they blocked the flow of sunlight down that main staircase and into one end of our living room.
My husband was skeptical about my plans to move daylight through our home; they were expensive and disruptive, particularly during our winter construction marathon. (Note: if you live on the edge of the tundra, as we do, try not to end up without exterior walls in January.) My spouse is now an enthusiastic proponent of natural light. We currently have so much interior light that our next project is putting up minimalistic window blinds that will help keep down air-conditioning bills in the summer and eliminate occasional streaks of glare. One research project after another has found that human beings are better off physically and mentally when they sleep in a dark place, so we plan to add roll-up blackout blinds to sleeping areas.
Since seeing wood grain de-stresses people—which is consistent with our nearly universal quest for hardwood floors—my husband and I made sure that all of the unpainted wooden surfaces in our home, from floors to woodwork to cabinet fronts, were refinished. Convincing my husband this was a good idea was easy. Preserving unpainted wood, especially in woodwork, is much admired among the do-it-yourself crowd, and there are lots of products and services to help with this work. It also doesn’t seem like it will be too difficult or time-consuming to refinish wood, at least until you start.
Since we live on a mini-size city lot, we have little access to soothing outdoor views, which makes the wood grain in our home even more important. We hope to add a water feature in our teeny backyard someday—research has shown that viewing water can be as restorative as seeing lush greenness. Right now, we get our outdoor fix on our roof deck; it’s high enough off the ground to put us in the lush green treetops of our block.
Since your home is not only an echo of who you are now, but a tool you can use to become what you want to be in the future, we’ve made more changes to our home. Environmentally responsible living is important to us, and we want to become even more careful about using natural resources. We plan to add solar panels to our roof soon; when we rebuilt our decrepit garage, the floor was designed so that it could eventually link into a set of solar panels and store energy drawn from the sun. My husband and I each have havens in our home, and we set them up as soon as we could. My husband has a lab/workspace in our basement (full-size windows keep this area bright), and I have an office that opens up to a former sun porch. These spaces are sacred. I don’t rearrange his; he doesn’t set up camp in mine. We all need a space, a territory, where we can totally relax and make sense of the recent events in our lives. In previous, more open homes, we learned to respect the boundaries of each other’s individual territories, even when no one could perceive them except us.
Just as people need privacy, they also need to socialize. We love the outdoors and entertaining there, but our small backyard makes a full-size deck at ground level impossible, so we head to the roof deck mentioned earlier with our friends. We have electrical outlets on our deck and can arrange the chairs there into a giant circle, because without eye contact, conversations