The man lies back on the couch, closes his eyes, and envisions his ideal home. He summons up visions of a pure white kitchen, a cool blue bedroom, a study paneled in pickled pine.
The guy on the sofa is not undergoing Freudian analysis. He is not attempting to cope with the malaise of modern civilization. Instead, he is having his condo redecorated. The problem that faces him is one of color schemes.
The workings of the brain are usually the focus of studies conducted by researchers in white lab coats. This semester, however, it is the subject of a new class at O’More College of Design of Franklin, Tenn. Taught by Mario Martinez, a painter, photographer, and clinical psychologist who holds degrees from Vanderbilt and the University of Madrid, “The Psychology of Interior Design” provides insights into the way people organize their world. The course is built upon neuro-psychological research, but no electrodes are involved. Martinez’s goal is to give would-be interior designers the science-based tools that will help them please their clients.
The image of the interior designer as scientist, rather than artist, explodes every stereotype of decoraters burying their clients in piles of fabric swatches and murmuring mysterious malarkey about “the perfect red” and “just the right nubbiness.” What Martinez preaches in his course is exactly what good designers have been doing intuitively for years.
Many designers simply expect to play a game of 20 (or 200 or 2,000) Questions with a client in order to get a grip on the individual’s tastes and inclinations. And many designers admit that a sort of Freudian transference often takes place when they merge hearts and minds into their clients.
“You start out helping on paint colors,” says well-known Nashville designer Jay Turman, “and pretty soon they’re calling you up for advice every time they have a party.”
Dan Burton, one of Nashville’s most legendary interior decorators, recalls a client who asked him about the shade of toilet paper she should use. “I really don’t do toilet paper,” Burton explains, “but sometimes it comes up.”
Martinez does not deal with client co-dependency. Instead, he talks about the scientific factors that are involved in forming an individual’s personal taste. For designers, he says, there’s no more reason for random shots in the dark, since research indicates that different colors, different degrees of light and darkness, and different shapes elicit different chemical reactions in the human brain. When they interact with the individual’s psychological needs, those reactions can result in feelings of satisfaction or stimulation, frustration or uneasiness. Designers who can predict those feelings will, logically, run into less trouble when it comes to making recommendations for their clients.
“The home is the extension of human personality,” says Martinez. For over 100,000 years, the place where people gather—whether it’s a cave, a hut, or a suburban ranchburger—“has been the place of community, the place where people come together for the evening meal to validate the day. We don’t have dinosaurs any more, but we have Wall Street. We’re still fighting, and we go back to the cave to revitalize.”
According to Martinez, designers will have less difficulty creating that revitalizing home space if they have some knowledge of how the mind perceives color and space. That knowledge may also help designers avoid the tendency to impose their own taste while ignoring the client’s true desires. Martinez teaches his students how to test their clients to determine color and space preferences. That way, the designer has dependable data to act upon.
“It is a scientific fact,” says Martinez, “that different colors create different reactions in brain chemistry.” If a person’s color of preference is in the blue-green range, he explains, that person is probably seeking peace and tranquility. Emotional excess is not the goal. Lovers of red, on the other hand, want to be refreshed and uplifted—they crave more stimulation.
When Martinez looks at his data, clear patterns begin to form. For example, he asserts that 75 percent of persons who name violet as their favorite color “are pre-adolescents or pregnant women. These are individuals going through hormonal changes, which create a strong level of emotion. And violet is known to stimulate the endocrine system, the thyroid.” Apparently, a craze for violet is not all that different from a craving for dill pickles and ice cream.
When the modern-day cave dweller plans his cave, Martinez says, every room can offer its own amount of tranquility or stimulation. “What I tell my students,” he says, “is that they must look at the combination of aesthetics and function. Each room has an energy requirement that is based on what a person does in that room.”
For example, a kitchen is a rather animated place. “In the kitchen, you want a person to feel comfortable, but also alert because it’s a food-preparation and eating space,” Martinez says. “The kitchen is creative space where it might be more nourishing to use white with a highly saturated color—a red or yellow, say—as an accent.”
On the other hand, a bedroom is a place of rest and sensuality. “If a client is a ‘blue-green,’ I would ask them where they want to feel most relaxed, and I would use the blue-green palette there.” Martinez suggests. “Establishing a color preference doesn’t mean that the whole house has to be done in the same shades.”
Martinez expects his students to consider “chroma”—the actual color and its degree of intensity—but he also asks them to consider the “value”—the degree of light or dark—in a room. It’s a well known fact that light stimulates the brain—we’ve all heard about people who suffer from depression during the gray winter months. Likewise, darkness stimulates the pineal gland to produce a hormone that induces sleep. If we’re exposed to too much light, we get restless; too much dark, and we’re down in the dumps.
These general truths translate into specifics when it comes to the design of the spaces in which we work and live. Martinez teaches his students to give their clients a “semantic differential test,” which allows the client to evaluate materials “on a scale of very light to very heavy, very comfortable to very uncomfortable.” A light metal such as chrome induces a feeling of high energy. A rough dark wood, on the other hand, is a low-energy material because it is perceived as very heavy.
“All rooms need to have some weight,” Martinez explains. A space filled with chrome and light “may make some people feel unanchored, like they’re jumping all over the place.” At the opposite end of the design spectrum, a room composed of dark woods and colors, flocked wallpaper, and other rough textures may be too heavy for anyone but the most lethargic couch potato. Edgar Allan Poe liked dark rooms, and they turn up in a lot of his stories—just remember what befell the characters who happened to be trapped in them.
The “weightiness” of a room is, like color, related to its function. “The average person wants lightness in a modern kitchen,” says Martinez, “and more weight in a library or study.” That’s because a kitchen is a place of activity, not contemplation. A person reading in a study wants to feel relaxed, but alert enough to have ideas. “Dark, weighty spaces are sometimes useful even if they are extreme,” Martinez explains, “for example, in the office of a priest or lawyer.” A heavy room can actually reduce a person’s energy level. That’s desirable when the person is somebody who’s come seeking professional advice. A heavy room says that the person who occupies it is a figure of authority and solemn purpose.
When it comes to teaching how we perceive form—as opposed to color or light-dark values—Martinez uses principles derived from an ancient Chinese discipline called Feng Shui. The Chinese science of form is rooted in the recognition that there are no straight lines in nature.
“For 1,500 years,” Martinez says, “the Chinese have been building their homes on the principle that the undulating line is natural and that, because the straight line is unnatural, straight lines put the brain into a state of alertness.” Straight and hard edges can induce a positive energy, but if they’re taken to extremes they produce negative energy, a feeling of wariness. The Chinese lessen straightness with water, mirrors, and plants. The degree of modification is determined by the room’s function, to produce the most nourishing environment.
Whether we know it or not, when it comes to interior spaces, most of us are more like cats than we’re like dogs. A dog is all straight lines, heading directly from the doorway to the hand that feeds it. Watch a feline enter a room. What follows is a reconnaissance of the entire perimeter: No edge, no surface, not the slightest repositioning of an item goes unheeded. On the subliminal level, it’s the same with human beings. Our brains pick up signals from everything in our immediate space. The psychology of design aims to make us aware of causes rather than be confused by effects.
