Creating places to mingle in your home

Places where people will have positive, pleasant conversations:

• Will allow everyone who wants to make eye contact at any time they feel like it. Parties require the sorts of everyone sits in a ring facing towards the middle of that ring, sort of like how you sat in kindergarten during story hour.  People who can’t make easy eye contact can’t talk to each other, unless one of the conversants has, like your mother, eyes in the back of their head.  Circular tables encourage more collegial conversations while having people sit at the short ends of rectangular tables results in more “leader-lead” situations.  Whenever possible arrange seats so that people sitting in them will be at right angles to each other, this allows them to easily make eye contact or not, as desired, and also has been tied to the development of more positive relationships.
• Too much eye contact can be the end of even the best conversation. People whose eyes bore unrelenting into ours seem creepy, and we flee from them.  So, give people at your party something to look at besides each other.  Not a dancing bear in the garden but things such as plants or cut flowers or pieces of art of something scattered about on tabletops, etc. (another reason not to create a sleek, empty home).  Whenever needed, and we all need an eye break every so often, guests at your party can gracefully look away from the face of whomever they’re talking to and at that plant, etc., without seeming rude.
• If some of the chairs in your home where you think party goers will hang out, for example, the ones in your kitchen, don’t have cushions on them, add them. The new cushions don’t need to be plush or more than an inch or so thick, just there.  We are much more cordial with others when we’re sitting on something padded than we are when the surface under our butt is devoid of cushioning.  If you have wooden benches or something similar that people will sit on put cushions on those too.

 

So, you’ve arranged seats in a circle, given people eye contact “relief stations,” how else can your furniture improve your party? By keeping everyone’s head roughly the same height above the floor.  When people are looking up at someone that person being seen from below seems more adult-like, more competent and experienced, for example, than someone who is being physically looked down upon (the person being looked down on seems childlike, less skilled, and experienced).  In any of the conversation zones you put together make sure that everyone is sitting on chairs or stools or sofas or loveseats with the seating surface at the same height above the floor (generally, but not always, because furniture legs are the same length) or they’re all sitting on cushions on the floor.

When people are reclining, they’re more relaxed, but fitting too many reclined seats into a party space can be difficult and allowing some to recline and others not, can lead to inter-attendee “tension.”

Make the walls warm colours, people seen in front of warm walls seem more friendly than people in front of cool coloured walls. Warm colours also boost our appetite, so beware.  Put some warmer bulbs in table top and floor lamps and turn off the overhead fixtures; the warmer, dimmer lighting will increase the friendly vibe and keep conversations purring along.

Make sure the light is NOT uniform (but do make sure that there are not spaces that are so dark that people will have some sort of accident in them). Lighter spots will become territories of particular people or groups, they’ll colonise them.  If creating zones for people with light doesn’t work for some reason, arrange furniture to create nooks and eddies that people will find themselves in where they can spend a while comfortably.  It’s great if some of these spaces have views out over the rest of the space from places where people don’t feel like they’ll be surprised by people outside the group; this all relates to creating spaces with prospect and refuge, discussed here.