What is Home-y?

Many a quest is underway to create a place where someone or other, or some group or other, will feel at home. Workplaces, restaurants, stores, healthcare facilities . . . you name it, even actual houses, where people feel at home are being developed.

Why all the emphasis on home?  When we feel “at home,” whether we’re actually at the place the postal service recognizes as our home or a library nook that we feel is “ours,” we’re profoundly comfortable, in a way that boosts our cognitive performance and our mental wellbeing.

Your house has a spirit and it needs to align with your soul; creating a home that puts the neuroscience research on residential design to work makes that happen.

But what specifically makes a place feel like home?

Beyond the obvious condition of access to people with whom one feels a psychological bond, what defines a home? What sets it apart from an otherwise just fine space?

Research by neuroscientists makes it very, very clear that in home-y spaces:

• We have a comfortable level of control over our physical environment; they are our very safest refuges from the challenges of modern life. We each have a territory where we live, sometimes those territories are marked with solid walls and a door that closes and other times boundaries can be more “conceptual,” for example, the area lit by a particular light bulb, but it’s ours at least when we’re in it and we can let down our guard and just be ourselves.  Groups, such as married couples, also need territories and can find them at home. Control can take a variety of forms, from personalizing with decorative elements we like (which helps us feel calm) to choosing where to spend time to having privacy when we want it (more on privacy later), to being able to change environmental conditions (turning lights on or off, raising or lowering blinds, rearranging furniture, or something else entirely). Too many choices (more than 4 to 6) is overpowering and actually degrades how well our brain works, but a comfortably curated set of options, provided to serve expected needs, makes our heart sing; the reward centre in our brain lights up when we anticipate being able to make a choice.

• We have the privacy we need to spend time with whomever we want, or no one at all. When we have privacy, and groups need privacy just as individuals do, we have control over whom we can see and hear and who can see and hear us.  It’s different from being distraction-free because we’re often distraction free at the whim of another person, we’re in the family room working away on whatever and not being distracted, but someone can walk in and join us at any time and distract us in myriad and sundry ways.  When we don’t have privacy when we need it we can’t make sense of recent events in our lives and our minds start to misfire, like an old-time skipping record.
• We feel safe and secure, as we define those terms.  There are some universals, however.  We’ll feel best about sleeping when from our bed we have a clear view of the door into the room we’re in but are located so that someone entering wouldn’t see us right away, we like that person’s view of us to be blocked by an opening door for as long as possible so that we know they’re there before they’re sure we’re around. Also, we prefer smaller windows in areas such as bedrooms or bathrooms where we might be more vulnerable.  We also have social relationships with our neighbours, which can help us feel safer, when we know where our property/territory begins and ends—fences do, as it turns out, make the best neighbours, but that fence is a signal, it doesn’t actually have to be too formidable a barrier.  A picket fence or a few plants lined up in a row, that set your property off from the sidewalk or neighbour’s yard are enough to signal “I belong here and you belong there” to neighbours and people passing by on the street and that’s enough to do the trick, when we’re signalled, we’ll behave appropriately, and not trespass or degrade another person’s home, even if it would be easy to do so.
• We’re able to socialize with people who matter to us.  There are lots of ways that design can help us mingle with others, as discussed in this article.  For example, as discussed in the linked to article,  everyone participating in a conversation should be sitting on seats whose legs are the same length or sitting on the floor, so no one is being looked up to or down on; that looking up or down distorts how we think about other people, as mentioned in this article.  Another example: Dim-ish warm coloured lights and warm colours on surfaces also smooth our conversations with others.
• We feel empowered to express our identity as a person/group and that the space is “saying” positive things about us. For our own good and to support positive relationships with others we all need to know what we (as individuals or as a unit, say a family) are proud of about ourselves and what we value in ourselves, others, and our society.  What we find important about us.  We send these signals through architecture, interior design, and how we personalize our homes.  Our home tells people that we value our academic accomplishments or the wisdom we’ve picked up travelling around the world or the role we play in our family or something else entirely and we tell our story with photographs on display, art in place, and the books scattered about, for instance.  Research indicates that homeowners are particularly concerned about the messages that will be sent by the colours they select for walls and other surfaces.  Whether we open our windows or not to let in fresh air can even be tied to our self-identity.  Clean smelling air sends a particular message that scented air and, heaven forbid, stinky air, doesn’t.

• We feel the space is familiar. For more on familiarity and why it matters so much, read this article in this issue.
• We can relax and take steps to maintain our health. Multiple articles from The Space Doctors have detailed how to create relaxing spaces and how to boost physical health through design, for example this one and this one.  Design can help keep stress levels down, for example, and lead to blood pressure readings that your doctor will find quite satisfactory.  Design can also help your sleep, for instance, which is good for your health and discussed in these articles. And a final example:  those indoor plants that boost our mood and cognitive performance, as mentioned in this article, also clean our air.
• We’re able to restore our stocks of cognitive energy. When we’ve exhausted ourselves mentally, we desperately need to top up our levels of mental energy, just like after a long drive we need to refill our car’s gas tank.  Until we “refill” our cognitive performance and creativity fall, our physical health is compromised because we are stressed, and we are just not very nice to other human beings.  For more on using plants, views, art, indoor water features, nature soundscapes, and many more tools to mentally refresh, read this article.  Biophilic design, discussed in these articles, is great for creating places where we feel calm and relaxed, where our mood and cognitive performance is good, and we can restock our cognitive juices.
• There’s support for the task at hand, whether that’s laundry, teaching the kids about quantum physics, writing advertising copy, or something else entirely.  We’ve talked about creating places where you can do what you’ve intended in multiple articles; we cover home offices in this one, for example, and places where people have a great time mingling and spending time with each other here.