Goldfinch

Happiness, joy, and simplicity.

How to Make a Happier Home

There are ways we can make our dwellings more restorative, mimicking the natural environments in which we evolved to thrive.

$5.00 USD

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How to Make a Happier Home

There are ways we can make our dwellings more restorative, mimicking the natural environments in which we evolved to thrive.

24 The KonMarie Method

Marie Kondo’s “KonMarie method” does not strictly mean minimalism, so why do many people make it out that way?

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15 Sustainable Swaps for Your Home

We scoured the web looking for the best budget-friendly, sustainable swaps for items you use daily.

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How to Make a Happier Home

Many current housing design trends ignore what science has consistently proven is best for our emotional comfort and well-being. Fortunately, there are ways we can make our dwellings more restorative, mimicking the natural environments in which we evolved to thrive.

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The house is the primordial human structure, the building from which all others evolved.

“We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us,” Winston Churchill observed. But humans have been around far longer than buildings. And before we started constructing our own spaces, the elements and environments of our natural habitats shaped our minds and bodies in ways that remain core to our well-being today.

Research from environmental psychology—the wing of behavioral science studying how built and natural spaces affect our health, mental processes, and social interactions—consistently suggests that buildings support us best when they echo the scale and tone of the natural world, through pattern, dimension, light, layout, and sound.

The design elements that make us feel most comfortable often hearken back to features

from our evolutionary past.

Ever wonder why you loved your great aunt’s rambling old Victorian so much?

Why the best conversations at the party always take place in the kitchen? Or why, for all its rational perfection, the minimalist aesthetic leaves you cold or, worse, stressed?

Unfortunately, many leading trends in residential interior design today don’t align with what research finds is best for our mental health. A 2019 systematic review identified

Rooms with wooden surfaces increase the general sense of comfort in spaces.

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especially compelling neurophysiological and selfreported evidence supporting the beneficial emotional impact of design tactics such as the five that follow. Together, they form a blueprint for happier, healthier homes.

The pressure to build more sustainable and affordable homes today presents a critical opportunity to put this blueprint to use. In cities from Los Angeles to London and in the suburbs surrounding them, people face severe shortages of affordable shelter. In 80 percent of the United States, home prices are rising faster than wages, according to a report from ATTOM Data Solutions. Climate change is affecting housing choices as well. As more communities seek to house residents in more closely connected and less oil-dependent settings, many experts believe that our future dwellings will be smaller, denser, and higher in the sky.

Such predictions may fill our heads with science-fiction visions of minuscule spaces, with beds that retreat automatically into walls and robotic food trucks hovering outside our windows. But the rise of moderately dense housing developments, known as the “missing middle,” can also play a major role in easing these economic and environmental ills. A healthy helping of townhouses, duplexes, and three- to fourstory apartment buildings can transform suburbs as well as cities.

Shrinking residential space doesn’t mean that our homes have to be reduced to “machines for living,” as 20th-century Swiss-French modernist architect Le Corbusier famously advocated.

In fact, if the answer to our housing crisis is to build smaller and denser, it’s more vital than ever to design living spaces in ways that support human happiness and well-

being. Fortunately, we can make choices designed to do just that.

Wood Is Good Traditional wood floors largely gave way to wall-to-wall carpets and linoleum in American homes during the 20th century, and today vinyl rules the roost in multifamily construction, according to architect Mark Hogan, principal at OpenScope Studio. Why? “Honestly, most of this interior stuff is just completely driven by fashion,” Hogan says—and, of course, by cost.

The move away from wood flooring is especially unfortunate, because research suggests that having this natural material beneath our feet offers up a buffet of benefits. Spending time in rooms constructed with a moderate balance of wooden surfaces has been linked to decreasing diastolic blood

pressure and to a general sensation of comfort. These results aren’t surprising, given our growing knowledge of biophilia—the power of even visual contact with elements of the natural world to both reduce stress and sharpen concentration. Gazing at a living tree can swiftly reduce blood pressure and the production of stress hormones.

environments had positive benefits for the respiratory and nervous systems and helped facilitate restoration after work—something most of us desire from our homes.

The good news is that woodflooring options don’t need to add much to the total cost of a new building, Hogan says.

And any additional up-front cost of sourcing sustainable materials like engineered

“MANY LEADING TRENDS IN RESIDENTIAL INTERIOR DESIGN TODAY DON’T ALIGN

consider that wood may be the better investment for your home and family. That said, be sure to choose sustainably sourced natural materials with no VOCs (volatile organic compounds, such as formaldehyde), to avert harmful off-gassing.

In bathrooms, Hogan suggests investing in tile, which can last as long as 200 years with re-grouting, rather than vinyl or fiberglass, which tend to need replacement in as little as 10 years.

WITH WHAT RESEARCH FINDS IS BEST FOR OUR

mental health .”

In a 2017 study led by Xi Zhang at the Shanghai Jiao Tong University, participants were less stressed and fatigued in wooden indoor spaces than non-wooden ones. Using measures that included blood pressure, skin temperature, near-distance vision, and heartbeat, the researchers concluded that wood-filled

wood, cork, or bamboo tends to pay out in the long term. A well-constructed wood floor, for example, can last a century with proper maintenance.

Inexpensive vinyl may look tempting when you need to replace your carpet, but

Higher Ceilings Give Us Headspace House and apartment hunters obsess over horizontal square footage but often overlook the importance of vertical space.

The U.S. federal building code sets the minimum ceiling height for habitable spaces at 7 feet, but research suggests that we generally prefer our ceilings higher.

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