A space for being: Why a well-designed home can make us feel at ease

Google’s Ivy Ross, Muuto’s Christian Grosen, and Reddymade’s Suchi Reddy developed A Space for Being, in consultation with Susan Magsamen from Johns Hopkins University. One of the rooms, entitled Essential, was calming and cocoon-like, with a textured artwork wrapping around the curved walls. Photo / Emanuel Hahn

New scientific research has revealed that the design of your home can impact on your wellbeing, writes Leanne Moore.

Champions of interior design and architecture have long recognised the power of a room to influence our feelings. Now there is evidence that how we feel about the design of our home can impact our health and wellbeing. Neuroaesthetics, a relatively new field of science, has discovered that when we’re in a space that makes us feel at ease, our mind and body respond accordingly.

A partnership between Google and scientists at Salone del Mobile Milano (Milan furniture fair) in 2019 explored the impact thoughtful design can have on us. The exhibit, A Space for Being, consisted of three spaces designed to reflect three everyday living rooms, each with a unique look and feel. The spaces were designed using the principles of neuroaesthetics, which strives to understand how the brain and body respond to aesthetic experiences.

Architect Suchi Reddy. Photo / Steve Benisty

Architect Suchi Reddy, founder of New York-based architecture studio Reddymade, designed the interactive installation, in consultation with Susan Magsamen from the International Arts + Mind Lab at Johns Hopkins University. Each space had a different mix of furniture, lighting, music, artwork and sensory elements, such as distinct fragrances. The first room, Essential, had a calming look and feel with soft lighting and curved walls. A specially commissioned woollen tapestry by Dutch visual artist Claudy Jongstra, coloured using natural dyes made from flowers, added a large textural element to the curved walls.

The second room, Vital, featured vibrant colours, beams of light and a citrus smell. Interactive pop-up books filled with 3D artworks were dotted around the room to spark visitors’ interest. The third room, Transformative, featured steel, wood and leather. It was animated with a neon light by Dutch designer Sabine Marcelis and smelt of charcoal.

The second room, Vital, was bright and colourful with citrus smells and shafts of LED lighting. Photo / Emanuel Hahn

The rooms were furnished with products by Danish design brand Muuto to give each space a common aesthetic. This was to help minimise personal taste influencing visitors’ reactions, which were tracked with sensory triggers. Participants were asked to be in each room for five minutes. They could touch things but there was no talking, no phones, no technology allowed. Between each room there was a space that acted as a palette cleanser, a little room for visitors to walk through that was designed to strip away the sensory experience of the previous room.

Participants wore specially made wristbands, developed by Google in partnership with the International Arts + Mind Lab, of the Brain Science Institute at Johns Hopkins. The wristbands had four sensors to measure physiology, including heart rate and skin conductance. The wristbands were able to detect when a participant’s body was the most at ease and comfortable.

The third room, Transformative, was luminescent with high ceilings and the aroma of charcoal. Photo / Emanuel Hahn

When the participants had been through all three rooms, the bands measuring their reactions were removed and the information downloaded. Each visitor was given a customised report informing them which space they felt most at ease in, based on their real-time physiological responses, and when they were stimulated or excited by something. For many of the visitors, where they thought they felt calm was different from what their bodies were saying.

“Scientists have been monitoring and measuring how the brain changes in environments for the last 20 years,” says Magsamen, who leads the Arts + Mind Lab at Johns Hopkins. “We have been observing what happens in the body during a multi-sensory experience that involves temperature, sound, colour, shape and smell,” she continues. “The truth is that we are feeling beings, we were designed that way. The feelings come first, thought comes second. We’re taking in data all the time, without even being aware of it, and our body is processing this data and then making additional sense of it.”

Susan Magsamen from Johns Hopkins University. Photo / Supplied

Reddy adds: “Once you can really understand what thoughtful design and architecture does to you, you can see that it’s not just a status symbol of who you are in the world. You can change your environment, and you can create spaces that suit your needs, and that’s a conscious decision.” Magsamen agrees: “We have agency over what we surround ourselves with. We must feed ourselves with the experiences we need to feel healthy and happy.”

The scientific proof that design is important underscores what experts in the field of interior design have innately known – that a room has the power to touch us, and it’s much deeper and much more important than the hue of a cushion you put on a sofa or the colour you paint your bedroom. Put simply, being a space where we feel good can be life enhancing.

The installation also revealed that the allure of a room varies from person to person. Beauty, it turns out, really is in the eye of the beholder. When the data from the approximately 3000 participants in the Milan project was analysed, no room stood out as a favourite. There was an even distribution between the spaces the visitors felt most at ease in: one-third preferred Essential, one-third, Vital, and one-third Transformative.

A Space for Being is part of the continuing research into how human-focused design can foster wellbeing and how this knowledge can be used in design decisions. The research tells us that a well-designed home is so much more than a series of rooms that look good – a carefully considered and intentional space also has the potential to make us feel at ease. A space for being – and wellbeing.