The Psychology Behind Why Some Homes Feel Good But Most Don’t: Interior Design Principles Explained
Though it may have enjoyed occasional waves of pop-cultural prestige over the years, interior design remains an overlooked art. That is to say, few bother to appreciate, or even to notice, its similarities with other, more “serious” forms of human endeavor. Watch the recent Five by Nine video above, and even if you’ve felt reasonably content with wherever your own couch, chairs, and tables have come to rest up until now, you’ll soon find yourself considering which principles of interior design you’ve always been unknowingly violating. For our eyes “read” a room just as it would a paragraph, or even a painting, and they sense instinctively if something’s wrong — or, worse, if too much is right.
One common amateur mistake is to arrange rooms so that “everything lives on one single horizontal band that starts at the floor and ends around two and a half feet up.” With all the furniture on more or less a single level, your eye “has no reason to travel upward or into the corners,” and thus perceives a strangely flattened space.
“Placing visual interest at varying altitudes” creates a more complex visual path, which convinces the brain it’s in a more expansive (or indeed expensive) space. Mounting curtain rods well above the window frame also goes a long way toward creating this same overall effect. The use of vertical lines in general, in the form of bookcases, wall textures, or anything else, creates more “visual runways for your eyes.”
On the horizontal plane, few mistakes could be as widely committed as pushing a sofa up against the wall. Professional designers prefer to “float” their furniture, leaving “a gap that hints at hidden depth.” To better understand this phenomenon, consider how landscape painters tend clearly to separate the foreground, the middle ground, and the background: with the middle ground of the sofa flush against the background of the wall, “the brain learns to read them as a single flat plane.” Separation introduces defining shadows, a medium that can yield much greater results if manipulated with lamps and other forms of directional lighting, as opposed to overhead fixtures that flood the space with uniform light. Given the near-universality of against-the-wall sofas and fluorescent lighting cranked up to the max in Seoul, where I live, a Korean version of this video couldn’t come out too soon.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.