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.