DESIGN : Feeling at Home Is a Hearth and Soul Endeavor

They say home is where the heart is. Now they’re saying if your heart isn’t in it, you’re not comfortable.

“If people feel bad about their home, it is often because of something deeper than decorating or choosing the right colors,” Clare Cooper Marcus says.

Marcus, an architecture professor at the UC Berkeley, published the results of 20 years of research in “House as a Mirror of Self: Exploring the Deeper Meaning of Home” (Conari Press, $24.95).

While a home can say a lot about a person, it isn’t all psychological, she says. For example, if you need a new rug but are short of cash, you may have to wait to buy it until you’re more solvent.

“But,” she says, “a room that is almost entirely bare is a red flag to me, especially if the person has the wherewithal to decorate. It may mean this individual does not feel he or she deserves to have a nice place to live.”

She says the home is as important as friends to one’s well-being.

“People relate to their home with as much intensity as they do to other people,” she says, “especially in times of crisis, such as death, divorce, or disaster.”

That fits with the findings of environmental psychology--a relatively new field that focuses on how people interact with their environment--that an inborn desire to create a home surfaces early.

“Between the ages of 6 and 10 or 11, children in virtually every culture and every socioeconomic group engage in a form of play in which they make houses, dens, forts or cubbies,” Marcus says, but adding that the approach differs with the sexes.

Girls lean toward the interaction of family in playing house, while boys are more interested in building the house and in establishing territorial rights.

“They’re more likely to build a clubhouse where others can’t come in,” she says.

Gender differences persist later in life, too. Marcus says she found that men often prefer large, open spaces and high ceilings, while women prefer cozier rooms with doors that close.

For her research, Marcus helped people explore the deeper feelings about home by having them draw a picture of their house and then talk to it. When they run out of things to say, she asks them to speak as the house.

“Even the most reluctant soon find they are chatting away, once they get into it,” Marcus says. “They tend to be more honest when speaking as the house. Occasionally a house has even told someone that it was time to move on.”

Marcus says these monologues can uncover bad feelings about the home that have been swept under the rug. Exploring these feelings may lead to ways to make the home more pleasant or to finding another place to live.

“The great advantage we have over earlier generations is that we live in an era in which exploring your feelings is permitted and even encouraged,” she says, “and this allows us to change our lives.”

Marcus has an unconventional take on the war parents wage over their teen-agers’ rooms.

“Creating a bizarre room is a normal and even laudable thing in teens because it shows that they are revealing themselves,” she says.

But when pig-sty living follows young people to college or their first apartment, it could signal a problem.

“This could mean they don’t know how to keep their new quarters tidy because they didn’t have to do it at home,” she says, “or they may be resenting taking on an adult role which calls for straightening up and doing their own laundry.”