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Sometimes, you walk into a building and you just feel at home. Maybe a family from church has invited you to a dinner party—you don't know the hosts very well, and you've never been to their house before. But you feel right at home, right away. There's something comfortable, relaxing, and inviting about their space.
Winifred Gallagher's smashing new book, House Thinking, helps explain why some spaces feel inherently homey to us. Certain spaces make us feel at ease, and others do not. "Unfortunately, most of our information about the home comes from profit-driven experts, media, and merchants, who insist that how our houses and apartments look is more important than the less commercial but more crucial issue of how they make us feel." Approaching our houses from the vantage of evolutionary psychology, she argues, can help us make better decisions about simple things like arranging our furniture—and those decisions can go a long way toward making us more comfortable, more at home.
Her book walks readers through a house, room by room. I found that Gallagher named many of my inchoate desires, things I intuitively wanted from my house, but didn't know how to articulate.
You might have felt at home as soon as you entered those aforementioned acquaintances' house, for example, because of their entryway. Many houses and apartments try to save space by doing away with an entryway. Gallagher argues that these poorly planned entries, which "dump you right into the living area," leave people feeling awkward or uncomfortable, while houses with a defined vestibule or entry hallway help people transition from the chaos of the street to the more interior space of the home. "A good entry tells you that you've left the mad world behind for the private haven, and invites the expectation of pleasure to come."
Gallagher is, in some ways, riffing on the insights of Christopher Alexander (to whom, it seems to me, Sarah Susanka also owes her greatest debt). In his controversial classic A Pattern Language, published in 1977, Alexander develops an aesthetic vocabulary that helps us describe what is beautiful and life-giving. His detailed patterns for building houses and communities express what we want in our houses and suggest how we might get there. Alexander shares Gallagher's beliefs about entryways: "houses with a graceful transition between the street and the inside are more tranquil than those which open directly off the street. The experience of entering a building influences the way you feel inside the building. If the transition is too abrupt there is no feeling of arrival, and the inside of the building fails to be an inner sanctum."
I chewed on that for a while, and it made good sense. Our good friends, whom I'll call the Xs, live in a cute arts-and-crafts bungalow—with no entryway. I always have felt a little ill at ease knocking on their front door and simply barging into their den, even though the Xs themselves are incredibly hospitable and welcoming. I dislike the sense of intruding upon the Xs' lives simply by opening the front door. I feel better, more at ease, when I visit friends with an entryway.
Gallagher also suggests that we also gravitate toward spaces that offer "prospect and refuge"—that is, we like "a big, bright space that has a broad interesting view," but we also like refuges, "snug protected haven[s]." Ideally, homes incorporate both. When Frank Lloyd Wright designed a house for Edward Cheney, Wright lowered the ceiling area around the hearth, ensuring a "cozy, cavelike refuge from which to survey the living area's loftier, brighter, open prospect." Spaces that offer this choice—spaces in which we can curl up securely at the hearth, or sojourn into the broad openness of vista and view—make us feel at home, which is why many people like houses with varied ceiling heights. (Again, Alexander makes the same point, a tad more bluntly: "A building in which the ceiling heights are all the same is virtually incapable of making people comfortable.") Unfortunately, most houses built today have ceilings of constant heights, because they're cheaper to build.
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