What does your home say about you?

At least according to the experts in these sorts of things, it seems most likely that people will form their most useful opinions of others when they actually have some idea who those other people are, what’s important to them, what they value in themselves and others.

Which means that when someone comes into your home, you need to carefully consider how they’ll interpret what they find.

Is your home clean and well-ordered?  Then it seems likely that those are things you value about yourself (or your cleaning service just left) and whomever is considering you can decide if that’s a good thing or bad.  Was your home apparently “decorated” using some sort of plan or is your interior look a fine example of “design by cyclone”?  Do spaces tend to seem more formal or relaxed?  Do the pictures on your walls and tabletops indicate that you yourself are a dedicated sportsperson, or that you never miss a game on TV?  Are you open to new experiences and ways of thinking, as evidence by eclectic table top items and an array of book types, or are you more of a comic book fan?

Getting clues about who you are through objects on display not only give people some idea of better and worse discussion topics, but also the systems by which you live your life.  For example, in more formal situations we keep larger personal spaces than in more relaxed ones.

When people can’t get a good idea of what’s important to you and how you choose to live your life, they get very stressed, so leaving cues is important for pairings that may ultimately grow into positive relationships.

There are other ways that place can really throw off bonding when relationships are being formed. 

A place needs to “say who you are” but it can’t be too repetitive while it does so.  If a space seems cluttered, visitors can’t figure out who you are and the work of making sense of the place makes everyone there, visitors and owners alike, very stressed.  The goal is to manage an area, so that it has about as much going on visually—in terms of numbers of colours, patterns, shapes, and the apparent orderliness of the distribution of these colours, etc.—as the interior of a house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.

You communicate through you and the way that you dress and are groomed, just as you do through the design of your home—if there’s too much of a disconnect between your clothes and your home, uncertainty will build.  If you are a craftsperson and show lots of your work around your home, a few broken fingernails may seem just right.  If you present yourself as a high-fashion sophisticate in your home and its furnishings, those same couple of broken nails, unless you also a weekend cowboy or girl, may seem puzzling.

It goes without saying, but sometimes saying is indeed useful, that a space that is too hot, or especially one that is too cold, or that has a not altogether pleasant smell, will stress out visitors. If you have steam heat and your radiators clang unpredictably from time-to-time, do not expect your visitors to be charmed.  Any sound that’s intermittent and tending to the unpleasant definitely builds stress in a place.

Again, it goes without saying, but here we’re saying again, that loving someone else also requires loving yourself (no, I don’t mean that).  You won’t be all you can be with others if you’re stressed or unhappy.  Articles on how you can bring down stress levels via design are here and how you can boost your mood via design are here.