De-clutter and then move those plants in…

If you live in a place with bad natural light, if you always forget to water (if this is you, please don’t ever bring home a kitty, puppy, or baby), or if things just seem to die on your watch (see again, the early point about kitties, puppies, and babies), a good fake green leafy plant will work fine.  You know a good artificial plant when you see one; its one that you need to reach out and touch to make sure it’s actually real.  Do remember if you invest in good artificial plants (and they can be an investment, and worth making), to dust them every so often.  A real plant with a thick coating of dust fuzz and pet hair would be dead, and so seeing bunches of dust, etc., on a fake plant makes it clear that it is artificial, which blows the whole scene you’re trying to create.

Now, on to visual complexity, known to the non-scientific out there as “clutter.”  Our earliest cousins were continually looking around their world to see if danger approached, and we still do that today although we don’t often think about the fact that we do.  Old habits that kept us going die hard.  We did develop as a species in spaces with something going on in them visually, not in sterile white boxes populated only by a Mies van der Rohe sofa.  With moderate visual complexity it’s relatively easy to see danger approaching but we don’t have the feeling that things that think we look tasty can see us too easily—there’s a survivable homeostasis between seeing and being seen.

Like Goldilocks in the story with the three bears we want just the right fit, just the right visual complexity.  A space gets more complex as the number of colours, shapes, and patterns increases (and those shapes and patterns can be in wallpapers and upholstery and rugs as well as in the volumes of chairs, sofas, other furniture, etc.) and when there is less order, or apparent plan in how all the colours, shapes, etc., are arranged. We like a middling amount of complexity, not too much, not too little.

There are equations for calculating visual complexity, but there’s no need to use them and almost nobody does.

Just compare what’s happening in an area of interest to a residential interior designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.  Residential interiors by FLW (as he’s known to his fans) have moderate visual complexity.  This sort of comparison may sound impossibly difficult to make, but if you bring up a photo of a FLW residential interior on your phone and hold your phone at arm’s length as you turn around in the space being assessed, you will know if you’re pretty much in line with FLW, visual complexity-wise, or more or less complex.

If you’re over complex, start to remove things until you are in the complexity “happy zone.” You don’t need to throw or give away what you’ve removed, unless you want to do so.  You can tuck things into the backs of closets, under your bed, out of sight however you can and rotate things you treasure in and out of view on whatever schedule you choose.