When your home sings, so do you. Or so say authors Maxwell Gillingham-Ryan of “Apartment Therapy:The Eight Step Cure”, Denny Daikeler of “What Color Is Your Slipcover?” and Alexandra Stoddard of “Feeling at Home.” Each author encourages the reader to look within before making any changes.
Photo from cotemaison.fr
Who are you? What do you want your home to say? What do you want to feel when you walk in the door? But, more importantly, what do you want your life to look like? Can the sofa you choose affect your career, love life or health? They agree that it can.
Daikeler encourages readers to think before acting. “Think of my process as the step before designing the plan, a most important step. I’m suggesting that you now enter a world of design that begins with you, not your space. It’s the world where there are no limits, no rights or wrongs, no rules, no prescriptions. It is truly an exciting world of beauty, order, and feelings that you’ve never entertained or experienced before.”
Gillingham Ryan’s book (and site) encourage apartment and condo dwellers to clear out, clean up and fix up before doing anything else. Designing the space comes last. He demonstrates how being at one with your home translates into being at one with your life.
“Like the body, the home should be thought of as a living organism. For starters, healthy homes are homes that consume carefully and get regular exercise. After health is established, style and decoration come come much more easily and can be seen as natural finishing touches. In fact, style and decoration are extensions of a healthy home. You can’t have one without the other.”
This concept is as old as design itself. It fascinates me to explore where psychology and design meet. When you clear your clutter, do you also clear your mind? Indeed you do!
In “Care of The Soul”, author Thomas Moore explores how caring for our environment, adornment and other outer focused activities actually nurtures the soul at the same time.
So, yes, a sofa can change your life. (But this doesn’t mean that you have to go out and buy a $15,000 sofa.)
Thanks for posting this! I just discovered Apartment Therapy (through the book at my local indie bookstore) and love it.
I’m also fascinated by the intersection of psychology and design. There’s actually a field of study that’s called ecopsychology/environmental psychology/architectural psychology, and more (they’re a new field, relatively speaking).
Take care,
I.
Fascinating! I am going to look into this. I’ll post more about it as I discover more. Thanks for your comment.