The research behind Conscious Home Design

Where life actually happens

The average person spends about 60% of life at home, waking and sleeping. For anyone who works from home, cares for family, or keeps the house, that figure can be closer to 90%.

No other environment gets a share of a life like that. Whatever a home does for you, or asks of you, it does for much of your life. That is why it is worth designing on purpose.

First principles

Seven minutes without air. Seven days without water. Seven weeks without food. The Rule of Sevens describes the limits of the human body and establishes an order of operations. Conscious Home Design begins with fresh air, clean water, food preparation, rest, and safety, then expands outward.

A framework, extended

Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of human needs has been used in nearly every field for eighty years. A conventional home program answers the base of it: shelter, safety, somewhere to sleep and eat. Conscious Home Design asks what a home can be in order to serve all of our needs, not only the physical ones. The Nine Essential Spaces are the answer.

This does not necessarily mean a home needs to be bigger. It means being more considerate about how space is planned and allocated around the full range of human needs.

The studies

Harvard University: the Harvard Study of Adult Development has found that the quality of a person's relationships predicts health, happiness, and longevity more reliably than education, professional success, or wealth.

Georgetown University: research has shown that changing the classroom environment and aesthetic, with the same teachers, students, and curriculum, can improve test results.

NASA: a clean-air study identified plants that can help filter common indoor pollutants.

University of Madrid: research has explored the relationship between the built environment, sunlight, and well-being.

These and other findings are laid out in full in Conscious Home Design.