Understanding the emotional quotient of a home
What we collect around us always has a “why”, and the answer to that question usually lies buried in our feelings
Last year, for a brief moment, I was a participant in the dating world. Now, there’s an activity that brings you—for whatever short or long period of time—into other people’s private worlds. You are either charmed or scared off. One of my dates, a man of many cultural pursuits, lived as though he was prepared for an emergency exit, both existential and real; figuratively speaking, his bags were packed and waiting at the door. His home was devoid of any signs of his interesting personality. There was no hint of any emotional engagement with his home; the furniture had come with the place and he could have abandoned it without a second thought. Part of the reason, a friend recently pointed out, could have been the fact that in India we consider homemaking as being relational to family-making. Single people, particularly men, are not expected to care for how they create their homes—the myth of the bachelor pad is a part of it, and so there is often neither effort nor expectation to create a home for the individual if there’s no family. There’s no feeling in the space and no feeling for the space.
I was recently reminded of that again because I’ve been space-hunting. Not to set up a home but for an office. Many of the places I visited happened to be residential dwellings that could also be used for commercial purposes, and so it was that I ended up house-visiting around the city. Going into rooms that people are inhabiting or one with signs of previous inhabitation can become difficult. It is an intimate and immersive act and not one that’s always pleasant. You’re walking through the manifestations of people’s minds, picking up threads of their emotions and thoughts, trespassing into their ideas for what their life is, was, or could have been. The way the furniture is placed, the notes-to-self on the walls, the little bottles of honey repurposed for money plants, the books, clothes, shoes—a frozen tableau of everyday life that sits there gossiping about its people, can feel intrusive and often sad.
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That abstract energy of a space rests within its objects, the way it’s laid out and how much care has been spent on arranging all of it. For instance, we have a cultural tendency to collect—even empty containers and mismatched objects that have long lost their purpose. But these seemingly innocuous things have a spirit of their own. They may be inanimate but the overwhelming presence of futile things can end up creating a sense of neglect and ennui. What we collect around us always has a “why", and the answer to that question usually lies buried in our feelings. To mine those emotions is difficult for most people, even architects, it would seem. Most are not taught to think about the emotional quotient of spaces, about the sensorial qualities that lend to the atmosphere of a building.
Last year, Bengaluru-based architect David Joe Thomas asked the students while teaching a first-year architecture programme to take five memories from their past and explore the spatial environments attached to those memories. Thomas, who runs his own studio, says he wanted the students “while just beginning to think consciously about architecture, buildings and spaces, to become cognisant to the emotional quotient of spaces, and tap into their existing spatial and physical memories". Through drawing, writing and models, they had to represent five spaces from these memories, analysing them closely through light, material, form and scale and assessing how it contributed to the way they felt.
That spaces have emotional underpinnings may seem, to some, like a basic design aphorism, but for most people it is difficult to understand and identify. If it were any easier then we’d care more about the way we make our homes and offices for that matter. I say this as someone who has made the same narrow-eyed mistakes. I’ve created and eventually fled, with no sense of wistfulness, spaces that were put together purely on practical considerations. It has taken me years to pay attention to my gut instinct, to sit with the energy of a place and recognise my emotional response to it. Swiss architect Peter Zumthor recollects in his book, Thinking Architecture (1998), that when he considers architecture, some of the images that come to his mind are from his childhood, from a time when he “experienced architecture without thinking about it".
Many people when they are probed about the subject of home, will be able to recollect some element of a place or an experience that brought them joy. The problem, though, is that most of us don’t sit down to harness that feeling when we’re making a home for ourselves. Whether you’re renting, single, married, living with a partner, owning, the circumstance doesn’t matter. Of course, look at the practical considerations of homemaking: finding the right location, affordable price points, facilities, etc. Such things are essential, but there’s more to creating a nurturing space than the sum of its practicalities. “I think one needs to critically think about spaces that they truly enjoy and feel content in," says Thomas. “Look at spaces beyond surface treatments and look at them through your value systems. If humility, honesty, stability, etc., are values you embrace then can your objects and spaces you surround yourself be a reflection of that."
Such considerations mean our choices indicate deeper meanings that go far beyond “taste", which I am guilty of using as a reductive way of sometimes explaining choices that people make, but it doesn’t track even for myself. I grew up in the Middle East where it was common to move homes every few years. When I think back to the spaces I occupied as a child, I am not nostalgic about any of them. They felt transient and transitional and that’s what they were. It has taken years of consideration for me to locate precisely the elements that I consider essential to give me a sense of home. What I was looking for when I made those circumstantial visits to other people’s spaces was a recollective feeling of something I’d known as a child, only it was not from my childhood home. I’ve come to realise that I like spaces that are small in scale, that feel cocooned and warm.
When I was seven or eight, my younger cousin and I would get under my grandfather’s large wooden study table and play house. I was “mother" and he was “child". At other times, that same desk is where I fantasised about my career, sitting in a too-large-for-me chair, writing notes with my grandfather’s ink pen. Some 40 years later one of the first pieces of furniture that I bought for my current home is an Art Deco writing desk that symbolically at least reminds me of everything that old table meant. The impact of that single object was such that even today I prefer spaces that can replicate that feeling in adult-size proportions. I realise the oddity of that, but it is my truth and when it comes to spaces, what feels right for you is all that matters. And sometimes, yes, it can be the underbelly of an old table.
Manju Sara Rajan is an editor, arts manager and author who divides her time between Kottayam and Bengaluru.
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