“Beauty”, these days, is not the sexiest word. 

In previous centuries, philosophers from Plato and Augustine up to Kant have argued over what beauty is and how to define it. For many of them, beauty is something real and definite we need in our lives, and this applies to everything from paintings to architecture to design.

Many of us in the 21st century, however, are much more focused on “practical” things like how to speed read books, or how to start a six-figure online business. With so many important goals to work toward, who cares how beautiful our living room or kitchen is – especially when beauty is such a controversial topic?

As it turns out, we should care.

We Are Sensitive to Our Environment

Call it beauty, aesthetics, or something else, but our physical surroundings affect us. Shape and color make up every square inch of our existence. All of us have walked into a new room or building at some point and immediately felt a shift in our own mood.

The writer and philosopher Alain de Botton notes:

“If one room can alter how we feel, if our happiness can hang on the colour of the walls or the shape of a door, what will happen to us in most of the places we are forced to look at and inhabit? What will we experience in a house with prison-like windows, stained carpet tiles, and plastic curtains?” ¹

De Botton’s question stands at the intersection of science and philosophy.  What will we experience in a room that’s dark compared to one that’s bright?  Or one that’s dirty versus one that’s clean?  

Up to a point, the answer is straightforward.  Scientists have done experiments to reveal how things like dirt, overly bright lighting, loud noises, and clutter make us anxious and distracted. None of this is too surprising.

But what about the curves and angles of our furniture? What about the color of our walls or the things we choose to hang on those walls?

The truth is that our homes don’t just affect us – they form us. They reveal and even determine who we are.

Your Home Shapes and Reflects Who You Are

De Botton has an interesting theory about our environment. It has to do, he suggests, with our very identity:

“Our sensitivity to our surroundings may be traced back to a troubling feature of human psychology: to the way we harbour within us many different selves, not all of which feel equally like ‘us’, so much so that in certain moods, we can complain of having come adrift from what we judge to be our true selves.”

Think of your “self” who loves reading, and how walking into a den filled with leather-bound books reignites that part of you. Or your “self” who loves cooking and sees a Uba Tuba kitchen island countertop with the same promise as a blank canvas.

Now think of the vague sense of despair that filled you the last time you entered a home that was either too sterile or filled with too many things that didn’t feel like any of your “selves”: shelves lined with old memorabilia, for example, or wall plaques with sentimental quotes, or smelly candles.

By designing our homes the way we want, we are reminding ourselves of who we are and who we want to become.

Our own homes tell both us and our visitors about who we are, what we like, what we do, and even what we believe. In fact, we can take this one step further:

By designing our homes the way we want, we are reminding ourselves of who we are and who we want to become. We reinforce our self (or our multiple selves), and we communicate that self to others who enter our homes. 

Your home is an important part of you, and for that reason, your home should be beautiful – especially if you want to be happier day in and out. But what defines “beauty” is something only you can answer.

Beauty Makes Our Brains Happy

The neurobiologist Semir Zeki is so interested in the notion of beauty and well-being that he helped coined a new term: neuroaesthetics.

In a 2004 study ² Zeki studied brain scans of people who looked at different types of art that they deemed either beautiful, ugly, or neutral. As it turned out, while responding to “ugly” art activated different parts of the brain for different people, the same parts of the brain – most notably, the orbitofrontal cortex – would “light up” in all participants whenever they viewed something beautiful.

But while Zeki was able to better discover how we process and interpret things that are beautiful (or ugly), his study wasn’t able to define beauty in “neural terms.” In other words, we can observe the effects of beauty, but we can’t explain what beauty is.

A more recent study on neuroaesthetics confirms this: it seems that while our neurons are involved in deciding if something is beautiful and brings us joy, what is “beautiful” will look different for each one of us. In conclusion, “a need to experience beauty may be universal, but the manifestation of what constitutes beauty certainly is not.” ³

Or in the much more eloquent words of the 19th-century writer Stendhal: “There are as many styles of beauty as there are visions of happiness.” 

As much as you might sing the praises of a mid-century modern look, your friend may prefer a cozy hobbit-inspired cottage, and in either case, this is partly rooted in neurology and shaped and reinforced by our personalities, lifestyles, and perhaps more mysterious factors. There’s no need to argue over which is better because each of them reflects each of you.

If you’ve ever lived with a partner or roommate, though, you understand that this issue becomes tricker. It can feel all but impossible to decide on a unifying theme, color scheme, or even where the accent chair should go. This sometimes challenging reality is also an opportunity to better understand our loved ones and what their “selves” think is beautiful.

Because we are all different, there is no shortcut to knowing how to design and arrange our day-to-day surroundings. But if you need some inspiration to help you get started, I offer you this advice from the 19th-century Arts and Crafts designer William Morris:

“Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.”

In consciously organizing your home in a way that is useful and beautiful to you, you are discovering and reaffirming who you are. As a result, you create a sanctuary that provides happiness every time you rest there.

1. de Botton, A. (2006). The architecture of happiness. Pantheon Books.
2. Kawabata, H., & Zeki, S. (2004). Neural correlates of beauty. Journal of Neurophysiology, 91(4), 1699-1705.
3. Conway, B. R., & Rehding, A. (2013). Neuroaesthetics and the trouble with beauty. PLoS Biology, 11(3), e1001504.