What should your furniture be made of? – The Long Read

After our houses and our cars, our furniture may be our biggest investment.  Sofas, chairs, tables . . . none of them come cheap and modern life seems to require multiple pieces for each room in our home—all of which can make setting foot in a furniture store (whether for new or used pieces) a petrifying experience (if you actually were petrified, you might easily become someone else’s furniture).

In this issue we’re going to focus on furniture—what yours should be like, where you should put it, and beyond furniture, what furnishings you should invest in—based on neuroscience research.

What should your furniture be made of?

Reports on our earliest days, say episodes of The Flintstones, indicates that our first furniture was made of stone, and well it might have been—but only the most occasional of stone furniture is popular—or even acceptable—today.

The very best furniture for us is furniture that is made of materials that will hold up in the conditions where we’ll put it to work—it’s awful for our self-esteem to need to use broken things and those in poor condition (antiques and things we inherit from loved ones fit into a special category of our stuff and it can be in not-the-best-of-shape).  Wood furniture beside a pool is not going to look good for long.  The same goes for many things that sit in the unshaded sun, indoors or out—they’ll fade and/or dry out.  If something will get lots of use by people who are not the neatest of souls, easy clean fabrics and surfaces keep tempers from flaring and egos from crashing.  White can be a good colour sometimes, when first impressions might indicate that the darkest of all colours should be used so spots/stains do not show.  White will show lots of dirt, but it can be bleached (spot bleached if necessary), which is OK on many materials and gets them back to looking good fast.

If it will hold up in a space, the neuroscience research makes it clear that wood with visible grain is a good choice, particularly if it has a warm (say oak) finish.  Wood with cool finishes, such as oak are also fine picks, but warm wood works the hardest for your brain.  When we see wood grain our brains work well, for example, we’re apt to think more creatively.  When we see wood grain we also are likely to feel mentally refreshed, ready to do some thinking that requires concentration and focus, even if we’ve already been doing some mental heavy lifting for a while.

A time not to invest in wood furniture?  When the walls/ceilings of the area where the furniture will be used are covered with wood with visible grain, think carefully about your choice.  Things work out best for our brains, performance and mental vitality-wise if no more than about half of the surfaces in a space are covered in wood, and that means all the surfaces, whether they’re table tops or wainscotting.  Look around the space where your furniture will live and do the mental math.

When wood is used outside, on patios, in clearings in forests, on clumps of seats scattered across the back yard, etc., those spaces seem like much more calming and refreshing spaces to spend time, or to look at, than when metal furniture is used—but your specific weather, architecture, and budget will, and should, have a big influence on material choices for outdoor areas.

Wood is a natural material and using natural materials is a key principle of biophilic design.

When we’re in biophilicly designed spaces we’re much more comfortable and our brains work better, we process incoming information and reason to problem solutions more effectively and efficiently than we do otherwise, say in a place that’s not biophilic.  We’ve talked extensively about biophilic design and how to do it here.

Other natural materials that might find their way onto your furniture include stone (at least theoretically and probably practically in combination with a significant cushion) and linen and wool for upholstery fabrics, for instance.  Natural materials that develop a patina over time, such as copper and leather, are great choices for furniture from a biophilic perspective.  Both wood and leather, for instance, can also be quite sustainable options, depending on how they are processed before they get to you—but they also can hold up well over time, which makes them psychologically sustainable as well—you’re not tempted to trade them for something new every  few years because they start to look bad.

Clear materials, say glass (ideally tempered) on a tabletop or in a Phillipe Stark Ghost Chair can make an area seem larger than it otherwise wood if other materials were used in these applications.  Since few of us live in places that are too large, this space expanding effect can be a real plus.

Glass and other metal options, such as aluminum and stainless steel, also send clear nonverbal signals to our heads. They tend to be associated with efficiency because they are relatively easy to clean and keep looking neat (as long as you don’t fracture them) and with a specific modernist furnishing style and social class.  They can also seem relatively low on any sort of hominess factor as so often we find them in doctors’ clinics and government offices.

If your furniture will be painted or upholstered, remember what we’ve said in the past about what sorts of colours do what in our brains (we’ll talk about patterns and using multiple colours together in the next section), for example, here.  Seeing colours that are less saturated and lighter, say a sage green or smokey blue or dusty sienna with lots of white mixed into it, so that it becomes a fairly light tint, is a relatively relaxing experience, with energy levels falling with saturation.  The reverse is true for colours such as sapphire blue or Kelly green that are saturated and relatively dark, seeing them makes us more energized.  Our cultures also form associations to particular hues.  For example, North Americans and Europeans are apt to tie the colour black to thoughts of sophistication and blues for dependability/competence/trustworthiness.  For more on cultural associations to particular colours, read this article.