Merging Households

As the weather gets warmer, people move, and often people who are romantically linked decide to take the plunge and move in together.

People who with tight enough bonds to decide to move in together may or may not have similar personality profiles.  As discussed in this article, it’s important to align place design with personality, and all that is easy when people moving in together have similar personalities, but what to do when they don’t?

Everyone living in a home, even the dog, needs a home base, a place that’s theirs and theirs alone.  Home bases are pretty easy to deal with from a personality-in-place perspective.  Each should take the forms that the personality of the owner relishes.

Life gets complicated in shared spaces.  How can the needs of different personalities be blended in a single space?

If people with different personalities need to share spaces to sleep or work, it’s best to design for the most “design-restrained” personality present.  In a bedroom or home office shared by an introvert and an extravert, the design decisions made should be tailored to the introvert (see the linked to article, above, for details on the sorts of spaces where introverts and extraverts shine).  If people high and low on conscientiousness will share these areas, decisions that support the more conscientious are in order.  For a couple where one person is open to experience and another is not the design should be more traditional, the sort of space where someone low on openness to experience can feel good.

When more public spaces are being developed, the desired form of the space is a little different.  If you’re creating a living room, a dining room or kitchen where people will entertain, or something similar, the space should support extraversion (even if it will be shared by an introvert partner), and openness to experience (even if someone low on openness will share it).  People who are conscientious have trouble in the sorts of spaces the low conscientious develop, so it’s best if there’s a “mixed” pairing that public spaces also are designed in ways that support conscientious users.

If spaces are very large, more flexibility maybe required.  For example, if all spaces in a home except for bedrooms and bathrooms are in one large space, an introvert should be able to find areas in that space shielded by screens (which can be moveable) or with sightlines that screen areas they’re not using, for instance.

In mixed-personality households the rule of thumb is that the more reserved, curtailed options that are comfortable for one partner should prevail in spaces where people need to sleep or work, but in more public spaces, particularly ones where socializing will occur, the alternative personality-design styles can prevail.