When I enter a person’s home for the first time, I often know more within a few moments than I am told. Not through judgement, more through a sense. How the things stand, what hangs on the walls, which corner feels inhabited and which untouched. Rooms are never neutral. They tell, before anyone says a word.
We read people through their rooms. And we read ourselves through them. In flats, rooms and kitchens we recognise rhythms, priorities and attitudes. This perception sets in earlier than any reflection. Before we consciously orient ourselves, the room has already spoken.
This first sorting happens early, before thinking. In neuroscientific terms it runs through the thalamus, the brain’s central gateway for the senses, where stimuli are filtered and weighted before they reach consciousness. A room thus creates an immediate resonance. It works before we interpret it. The architectural psychologist Tanja Vollmer describes how we always read rooms through our own experience. The room becomes a mirror. Not only of the other person, but of our own stance.
How accurate this readability is was shown by the psychologist Samuel Gosling at the University of Texas. Strangers, looking at living spaces alone, could assess personality traits, the big five dimensions from extraversion to conscientiousness. On some points they were more accurate than people close to the person. A room sometimes gives away more than a conversation.
But a room does not only mirror us. It also takes part in what we become. The perception researcher Axel Buether describes rooms as a kind of implicit instruction manual. They call forth behaviour. They allow closeness or keep it at a distance. A room that is lived in carries parts of the person who lives in it. It extends the inner life outward and becomes part of an inner geography.
This idea is not new. The architectural psychologist Clare Cooper Marcus calls the home a mirror of our self. If we learn to interpret what we see, it can become a source of self-knowledge. The architectural psychologist Riklef Rambow describes the connection between furnishing and identity as remarkably strong. I surround myself with things that carry meaning for me. Over time they become part of me.
Out of this listening something can grow that Rambow calls an anamnesis of dwelling, a quiet process of becoming aware. Where do I feel at ease and where not? What is it about, the height of the rooms, the view, the colours or the light? More important than what we think about a room is what we feel in it. If an inexplicable watchfulness stirs, perhaps a need for shelter has been touched. If calm settles in, we recognise an atmosphere that does us good.
The more answers we coax out of the hiding places of our memory, the more we come to ourselves in conversation with our home. To a sharpened awareness of our inner space. The psychiatrist James Yandell described this process. We create our surroundings, are mirrored by them and see in them what was not yet visible. Perhaps self-knowledge begins closer than we think. What does my own home tell me, if I really listen to it?