Maximizing Happiness at Home: Five Emotions to Consider in Home Design | Ana Marcu | Skillshare
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Maximizing Happiness at Home: Five Emotions to Consider in Home Design

teacher avatar Ana Marcu, Home Wellbeing, Licensed architect

Watch this class and thousands more

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Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Introduction

      2:59

    • 2.

      Happiness at Home

      2:06

    • 3.

      Safety

      3:04

    • 4.

      Comfort

      3:11

    • 5.

      Control and Identity

      3:27

    • 6.

      Pride

      3:39

    • 7.

      Happy Societies

      3:51

    • 8.

      Class Project

      0:56

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About This Class

Before you spend too much money on home decor, learn what truly makes people happy at home based in the latest science so you can make the right decisions for yourself. 

In this class, we will talk about one study with 13.000 participants breaking down the five emotions people need to feel in order to feel truly happy at home. These are: 

1. Safety - the most basic feeling one needs to feel in a home. We feel truly safe when neither the outside world nor the home itself provides a danger for us. Additionally, privacy is also one aspect of safety that needs to exist in order to make us feel truly safe. 

2. Comfort  - where we discuss the items that give a sense of comfort, like personal tools and items but also low noise levels and balanced temperature. 

3. Control is the need to change and modify to adapt to the environment around us in a way that suits our ever-changing lives. The more control we feel we have over our space, the happier we feel. 

4. Identity - the feeling we have when our environment reflects our style and personality. When the items around us are imbued with stories and values that are personal to us, we feel we identify with the home. 

5. Pride - is one of the most important feelings, and it is connected to our sense of achievement. Whether we own a home or are engaged in home improvements, our feeling of pride will receive a significant boost.

Who is the class for? 

The class is for anyone looking to understand better the science of happiness and what truly makes us happy with our home. 

The class is based on "The Good Home" report. 

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Love the class project? Want some more fun quizzes and reflection exercises?  Try the free "Home Happiness Worksheets Bundle". 

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Who am I?

I’m a licensed architect with over a decade of experience in Vienna, Austria. I have a double degree in Architecture and "Building Science and Technology", and I am deeply passionate about design psychology and optimising the interior design to create great emotional experiences for people. I aim to design spaces that make people FEEL loved, happier, healthier, and more creative.

In my classes, you will find tips and strategies to help you design a great home. You will learn how certain design decisions can influence your emotions and behaviour and what you can do to create a home that will make you feel happier and supported in your goals.

You can also check out my class, How to Think Like an Architect.

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Related Classes:

A Hygge Home: Danish Interior Design Principles for Cosiness and Comfort

A Biophilic Home: Interior Design For All Your Senses

A Calm Home: Interior Design for More Well-being

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Meet Your Teacher

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Ana Marcu

Home Wellbeing, Licensed architect

Top Teacher

About me:

I'm a licensed architect and have over a decade of experience in the design and architecture industry. I have worked as an in-house architect on various projects with a strong focus on furniture, interior design and experience design. I have a double degree in Architecture and "Building Science and Technology", and I am deeply passionate about design that generates great emotional experiences for people. I've recently started my little design studio, and I'm excited to teach you everything I've learned to help you create a great home for yourself.

Transform your surroundings, transform your life!

Your home environment profoundly impacts your mood, thoughts, behaviour, performance, and overall well-being.

Learn how to design a livi... See full profile

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Transcripts

1. Introduction: What makes us happy about our home? You might think that it's having a big home or owning your own home that might make you happy. But at least according to research, you would be wrong. There are three things that make most people happy with their home. Number 1 is that the home is in good condition. Number 2 is that the home is adaptable to changes and future needs. Number 3 is the home is perceived as spacious. These are the results of a study made with over 30,000 participants. What you'll notice is that we as humans have pretty reasonable expectations from happiness. We want the home that doesn't put us in danger, that is adaptable to change and does not feel cramped. That sounds pretty obvious, doesn't it? At the same time, these are not necessarily the things that we keep at the forefront of our mind when we look for and design our home. But besides this material conditions, scientists have determined that our happiness with our home is also connected to five core emotions. These emotions are safety, control, comfort, identity, and pride. In this class, we are going to discuss each of these emotions in detail and what you can do to experience them so that you have a clear roadmap to a happy home. Hi, my name is Ana Marcu and I'm a licensed architect. I [inaudible] over a decade as an in-house architect. I'm running my other design studio in a beautiful city of Vienna, Austria. I recently moved into a new home, which also doubles as my design and recording studio and I'm currently in the process of redesigning it. Moving here has made me reflect on the principles of happiness and what specifically makes people happy with their home. I decided to create the class around it. This class is complimentary to my classes, a hygge home, a biophilic home, and a calm home. Together with these three other classes, you will get a comprehensive overview of the kind of environment that will best support your overall happiness and well-being and should be your north star when it comes to making decisions about your home. Also, if you wish to assess your personal home happiness, I've created a whole happiness worksheet that will get you through a series of questions to help you find out which of the core feelings you master and which ones you might need to improve upon. If you're interested in the home happiness worksheet, there's a link in the class description that will help you download it. All you have to do is sign up to my newsletter for free. I often get class ideas from the questions and comments my followers leave on my monthly announcements. If you want to have your question answered in a lesson, or perhaps an entire class, make sure to press the "Follow" button at the top side of the screen, right there. All right, I hope you are excited to take this class. Are you ready? Let's start the class. 2. Happiness at Home: Welcome to the first lesson. What makes people happy with their home. Happiness it turns out to be very hard to study. It's a fleeting emotion. Now you feel it, now you don't. Two people can experience the same thing and one feels happy and the other one doesn't. In order to be sure what makes people happy with their homes, a study with over 13,000 participants in 10 European countries was conducted. The study took place in 2019, and it was a collaboration between The Happiness Research Institute and Kingfisher, which is an international home improvement company. The results were surprising. For example, our happiness with our home is more important than our income, whether we are employed or retired, whether we have children are single, and many other life conditions that are considered important to our well-being. Additionally, how happy we are with our home is roughly as important to our overall happiness as our mental and physical health. If you think about it, that actually makes sense. How happy our home makes us is linked to feeling at ease, feeling safe, feeling relaxed and being able to decompress and recharge, feeling connected with ourselves and feeling in control. Feelings and our emotional states very much influence our mental and physical health. Being happy with our homes is not limited to just having heating, good lighting, plenty of space, but it's also about how we feel and express ourselves through our home. Therefore, for the remainder of this class, I wish to talk about the five core emotions that scientists have identified as being paramount or emotional attachment with the home and the level of happiness that we feel. It's our pride, comfort, identity, safety, and control. Without further ado, let's go into our first emotion, safety. 3. Safety: Safety is not just a feeling but one of our most primordial needs. Maslow placed it at the base of his pyramid because all of the other needs and feelings of happiness absolutely rely on our need for safety. Our earliest homes were at their origin shelters, places that by design provided safety from physical dangers and harsh climatic elements like rain, wind, and snow. So if a home is not a shelter for us providing us with a sense of safety, it cannot qualify as a home which is why the feeling of safety is such an integral component to our happiness. These days the way a home provides the feeling of safety is twofold. Number 1, it protects us from the external dangers outside our home like crime and violence in the neighborhood. Number 2, the home itself is not a danger to us, meaning that our home is in good condition and it's not about to fall apart or on our head. There are no threats related to the condition of the home like leaks in the ceilings, mold, rot, structural concerns or bad sanitation facilities. All these problems that could appear in the construction fabric of a home can cause massive distress making us feel unsafe. This is why a home in good condition is the highest ranking desirable quality of a happy home because it provides a safe haven not only from outside threats and natural elements, but also inside threats, costly surprises or health hazards. Another element that I think needs discussing under the chapter of safety is privacy. Privacy is also a form of safety. The safety of our intimacy. When we live in spaces with walls that are thin like paper and neighbors can hear every word or the living units are so close together that others can see in our home, it can create a feeling of lack of privacy and by extend lack of safety. Now, some people cherish their privacy more than others and it can differ from culture to culture and from individual to individual. My neighbors across the street doesn't seem too worried about their privacy. Or maybe they just don't know how to install curtains. I on the other hand like my privacy so much in fact that when I moved in this apartment, the first point on my to-do list was to change the locks and installed drapes. Instinctively, the two most important things that came up on my to-do list were the feeling of safety and privacy. But although safety is important to our overall sense of happiness, it accounts for only 10 percent of the emotions that best explain how happy we are with our home. In order to experience an overall sense of happiness at home, we need to feel four more additional emotions. In the next lesson we are going to dive into comfort. 4. Comfort: Now that we can finally relax and feel safe from the weather elements or other dangerous. We will start to look for ways to make our home feel more comfortable. I have these walls that protect me from the outside world, but this is by far not yet at home. For me when I moved in this department, I made a list of the absolute most necessary things that I need to have to exist in this apartment comfortably, not luxuriously, but just enough to function like a human being. These were a table, a chair, a bed, a wardrobe, the washing machine in a vacuum cleaner. The layer above that would be a couple of tools and personal items like video recording tools, my maker tools like the electrical screwdriver, drill, tape, kitchen utensils, bed sheets, towels, and a couple of close. These are the items that gives me a sense of comfort is it cozy? Definitely not. But there's a sense of comfort and ease. But a comfortable home isn't just one where we can function, but also one where we can find time and space for ourselves. It's a place where we can recharge and restore, this is about having an adequate environment like pleasant indoor temperature or low levels of noise, but also access to nature and I talked more about this in my class. A Biophilic whole. A comfortable home also has to be perceived as spacious. Let me see how I can explain this better. Of course, a very small and cramped home doesn't make anyone happy. And that generally, when you have less rules than the number of people living in the space can start to feel pretty calm. But what scientists have discovered is that there is no correlation between how spacious home fields and the actual amount of square meters. What I mean is that there are people who live in a one-bedroom apartment and feel like they have plenty of space in people who live in mansions and still feel like their home is not spacious enough. How spacious a home fields has more to do with how you design and furnish the space than the actual size of the place. If you check out my class, interior design for smaller apartments, at the Lesson 10 apartments, you will see how a one-bedroom apartment can be changed to suit a variety of needs and number of people. As long as everyone inside can have their needs met, the space will feel spacious no matter what the size. Spaciousness, not the amount of space really matters, then is the third most desirable quality in a home that will truly contribute to the level of happiness. In the first lesson, we talked about safety and how a good condition is a great quality to have in a happy home and we just finished talking about spaciousness and how this contributes to our sense of comfort. Now we are going to discuss about two other important feelings, control and identity. 5. Control and Identity: We feel safe and we feel comfortable. What else do people need to feel in order to be happy? At least according to research, we also need to feel in control and very connected to this feeling is that feeling of identity. What I mean is that the more control we feel we have over our home, the more changes we can make, the more we can express ourselves and make our home look like how we want it to look, the more the feeling of identity becomes stronger. But our feeling of control over our home can be very much affected by the type of ownership we have and the extent of freedoms and limitations that are imposed on us when we take over a space. For example, renting and owning a home offer two very different levels of control. This desire to have agency and control over your own space is why many people decide that it's better to own a space than to rent it, because you can adapt the space around you over a long period of time and customize the space to fulfill your personal needs. That being said, in countries where the rental markets are highly regulated by the state and rental contracts are such that the people can make extensive use to their space like holes in the walls and changes to all colors, people to report a higher satisfaction with their whole overall and their need to own a space subsides. In fact, one of the biggest sources of my happiness with my home was the fact that I am able to have a dryer in the bathroom. But because my mushroom is so small, that would only be possible if I would be allowed to make holes in the wall to fix the wardrobe that holds both my washing machine and my dryer together. Without this permission, none of this would be possible. It's not the ownership that makes us happy, but the extent of control we have over our space to customize it to your individual needs that ultimately makes us happy. In fact, one of the key findings of this research is that adaptability is more important to our happiness with our homes, than home ownership. We don't necessarily want to own things. We want to feel in control. If you think about it, this desire to alter the space around us and personalize it is a desire that goes back thousands of years and it's not reflecting just humans making useful things around them like Mike Hudson wooden shelters. But decorating these simple homes with paintings or wood carvings or hand woven textiles. By altering the space around us, we create the feeling that our home is an integral part of ourselves when we pick the style for our home, when we choose furniture to our liking, when we place around the photos of people we love, or the little souvenirs we bought in past vacations, little religious or cultural items, they all remind us of who we are, where we've been, and with whom we belong. They strengthen our feeling of identity. But the feeling of identity is not just correlated with control, but also with one of the rarest emotions of all; pride. But more about pride in the following lesson. 6. Pride: Finally, our last core feeling that counts for 44 percent of the emotions that explain how happy we are with our home is pride. Pride is by far the most important, but also the rarest skewing because it is linked with our own achievements. These could be achievements related to home improvements or specific qualities that our home has or it could be related to the fact that we own the home. For some people owning a massive home is how they display their achievements. But for a lot more people, the feeling of achievement is generated through home improvements. Scientists have found that the more interest and time a person spends improving their home, the happier they are. Home improvements actually make us happier with a home even if we have no interest in doing the home improvements. Now, this all sounds wonderful, but I do want to say that this study was founded by the Home Improvement Company. Often, companies like this fund studies that come up with results that make them look good. Feeling proud because of home improvements might speak to me because I'm an architect and I love making things, but it might not speak to everyone. My advice is to take all findings with a grain of soul and try it for yourself and see how you feel. Back to the lesson. Additionally, how happy we are with our home is strongly linked to how long we see ourselves living in our home. If we know we're going to live in a place for decades because the rental contract is unlimited, like the place I live in or we own the place, the home improvements we undertake in our home accumulate over time, making our space highly customized to us, which then translates into an even happier home in the long run. Not surprisingly, the happiest people with their home are people over 50 because usually by that age, people have found their forever home and they have more time and some energy to customize their home to be of a specific liking. Seeing our home change into something we desire that expresses our identity or soothes a specific need that we have, enormously raises the feeling of pride for our home. Particularly improving the bathroom and the kitchen, seem to give the biggest boost in happiness and satisfaction with the home. I can totally attest to that. So far I have put together by myself the bed, the wardrobe, the tables, and the chairs, but nothing makes me feel as proud as the dryer over washing machines situation in my bathroom. This was such an undertaking. I'm still amazed that I have managed to get all the connections in the wall. Of course, the reason I mentioned this a second time in this class is because I'm really proud of it. What scientists have also seen is that the prouder people feel about their homes, the happier they are in general, and vice versa. The happier they are in general, the happier they feel with their home, which means that how happy we are with our homes is not an entirely standalone process, but it is influenced by how happy we are in other areas of our life. In the next lesson, I would like to discuss in which countries, people report themselves to be the happiest with their homes and some of the reasons why that might be. 7. Happy Societies: Because the study was made across 10 European countries, the natural question that scientists asked was, "Are the countries where a lot more people declare themselves as happy with their homes, or are these people equally distributed between these European countries? In other words, if we know that their home was such an influence on how they think and how they feel, thus our greater environment influences how we think and feel, and does that impact how we feel about their home?" And it turns out that a lot of the people that are happy with their home are clustered in the north, specifically Holland, Denmark, and Germany. And so the next logical question was, "Why do so many people in these countries say that they are happy with their home? Even though they don't necessarily have either bigger home, in size, than people in other countries, they are not all owners, they're not more expensively decorated, so it can't be just their home that makes them happy with their home, but the greater physical and social economic environment in which they live." Put in a nutshell, what scientists have found is that there is a link between happiness, trust, and egalitarian societies. Besides being geographically close, all these countries offer living conditions that are above average. They provide public safety, spacious homes, good sanitation, access to stable electricity, clean air, and access to green spaces for everyone. These are also populations with less income inequality and people in equal societies have equal access to resources and trust each other more, which leads to trustworthy neighborhoods that make people feel safer, more connected, happier in general, and happier with their homes. Now, before everyone decides to move to one of these countries, it's fair to say that our family and friends, the quality of social connections we develop with the people around us also matter greatly and they go more and more important as we grow older. Social disconnection followed by depression is something that a lot of people feel even in their own country, but particularly experts. Social connection is hugely important and should not be disregarded in the overall sense of happiness in a person's life. So is at home that makes us generally happy or is our general happiness enabled by social and environmental structures that make us happy with our home? The answer is that it goes both ways. On one side, having a home that supports our basic and personal needs equals having a happy home, which impacts our overall happiness. On the other, the social and environmental structures that surround us also play an important role in determining how we live and how happy we feel overall, which influences how happy we feel in our home. If people in the neighborhood generally trust each other, if they have equal opportunities to resources, and if our personal safety is not a daily concern, it will become significantly easier to put effort into making a home a happy one. The moral of the story is that in order to have a happy home, our efforts have to go toward both our home and our community. Investing in both is going to generate the overall sense of happiness that we are all looking for. All right. We're at the end of the lesson. Up next is the class project. 8. Class Project: For the class project I would like you to make a short analysis of your home and try to figure out what emotions you feel in your home and what emotions you don't feel and why that might be. If you need help with that you can use the home happiness worksheet I have prepared for you. It gets you through a series of questions where you can self-reflect a little longer and a little bit deeper about your happiness at home. All you have to do to download the worksheet is go to the link in the class description called Home Happiness Worksheet and sign up to my newsletter for free. Also if you liked the class I'd really appreciate the review. It tells Skillshare that you liked my work and it encourages other people to discover my thoughts. For constructive criticism or questions, you use the class discussion section. I love to hear what you think and help clarify any questions that you might have. Thank you so much for watching. I'll see you in the next class.