Housing Psychology Meets Scenography

Doctor Barbara Perfahl is a residential psychologist. Her real mission is to work with people who seek her advice to create a living or working space that is precisely tailored to their needs, to their person. To do this, she first researches with her clients what these needs actually are.
She also sets up flats for house viewings. In doing so, she lures visitors from one room to the next simply by choreographing her appeal.
In this interview with Claudia Steinert, she tells us how she approaches these two tasks and her thoughts on cinematic spaces.

VSK: Dear Dr Perfahl, thank you very much for taking the time to talk to us. As a home psychologist, what is the most important information for you to be able to provide specific advice on the design of a room? After all, your rooms are also about the past, present and future.

B.P.: The information I need is on two levels.
Firstly, living is so natural for us that we no longer question it. You could almost say that we are blind to the business.
So the first thing I ask my customers is: "What are you suffering from? What's wrong with your living space?", then: "What do you want?" and finally: "Why is it the way it is? What was behind the decisions that led to the current state of your home? Who chose the furniture, the use of space, the colours and the positions and what was behind them?"
I also ask what previous flats looked like. People can always easily remember what they liked about their previous home and what was important. The question, "How did you live as a child?" surprises most people. Yet these childhood homes have a huge impact on us. These childhood spaces are memorised as emotions. Young children cannot separate the spatial background, the emotions and their experiences.
Sometimes I ask the "fairy godmother question": What would your home look like if a fairy godmother came and conjured up your dream home, spontaneously and with all your imagination? Often the real needs are inside, detached from what has been brought to us from the outside and what springs from the mind.
A second sticking point is the supposed obstacles that prevent us from taking action.
My customers often develop ideas to change something and then anticipate the domino effect before it arises.
For example, the sofa needs to be moved to the other side of the room. But to simply try this out, the sideboard that is there would have to be removed first. But the wall behind the sideboard is damaged and would have to be repainted first. And so on and so forth. In the end, the sofa remains unmoved and the idea untested.
My job here is to break down these inhibitions. I go with customers into their home and together we first place a chair where we want the sofa to be. We sit down there and see how it feels to sit there. And then we're already in action. From here, everything usually goes much more smoothly.

VSK: On film sets, the choreographies that the rooms offer for characters and also for the camera movements play an important role. How is it with the living spaces that you work on?

B.P.: That plays a huge role in home staging. This is a service that we offer for viewing flats. Prospective buyers are guided through the property to get an idea of what it looks like. We furnish the flat to bring the rooms to life emotionally.
It can happen that a veritable caravan walks through the flat. The aim is to create a natural flow that is guided through all the rooms like an undertow. Visitors should feel free to discover all the rooms for themselves.

B.P.: This has a lot to do with mystery - the psychological, formal aesthetics of spaces, in other words: how do spaces generate emotions? Mystery here means finding a good balance between arousing curiosity on the one hand and not overtaxing on the other.
What makes me curious? If the room gives me sufficient orientation at first, but then I discover an accent at the back that I want to take a closer look at in order to understand it.
Decisive for orientation is, for example, the amount of stimuli and the question of whether the stimuli in the room are related to each other. If the furniture defines zones through its arrangement, light cones or carpets, if a function can be assigned to them, then I can orientate myself. Loosely scattered objects are more likely to lead to sensory overload.
In order to create a pull, the tension must be created in the previous room. What do I see through the open door? How concrete is what I see, what does the accent promise me? The paths should be open. The invitations must beckon from afar.
Most people find rooms that are overloaded with too many functions and information unpleasant. But if I only have a certain space available, I can gain a lot of peace and quiet if I define zones carefully.

VSK: If you were to set up a film flat for a main character, which position would you take first, that of the character or that of the viewer?

B.P.: The state of the flat reflects the current living situation. What is the family situation, the financial strength, etc.? I would go through the character; that often happens when I think of film flats.
It has to be said, though, that in reality there are flats that don't make many connections with the people living there. Some people have no intuition for what they really want. Also, flats for couples often only reflect one partner, while you hardly feel the other or not at all.

VSK: Have you ever seen a film set that didn't suit the character at all, or even particularly well, from a housing psychology perspective? And did this (non-)fit serve the film and therefore the viewer?

B.P.: I think it does: Film spaces that reflect inner conflicts. For example, the series "The Crown". A lot of the film takes place in the palace; on the one hand, it is magnificent and prestigious, but has nothing to do with the private individuals who live there. But it does have to do with the official rooms and roles that these people fulfil in office.
And then, on the other hand, there are these many small rooms, some of which look downright run-down.
For me, this makes it possible to experience the conflict between private person and public role. The palace is for the roles, the palace rooms are for the monarchy. But people have a private life in them.
There are episodes where the characters run and run in these gigantic representative rooms until they finally find each other. And they also look for themselves.
And then there are these little islands of personal space in a hostile environment.

VSK: Do you also have an example that made less sense to you?

B.P.: I sometimes find German crime thrillers inappropriate. The detective is often a single man who lives unconventionally and smartly in a loft. And I wonder how he can afford that in the centre of Munich. What's more, an inspector is a civil servant in a difficult situation, so I wonder how he comes by the art on the wall and the designer furniture. It irritates me because I can't understand this side of the character. When does he live this lifestyle when he's at work day and night?

VSK: An inspector sees terrible things in his daily life. I wonder whether you can somehow recognise this mental strain, which certainly goes hand in hand with this, in his living space. And in general, I wonder whether you can recognise psychological dysfunctionalities in living spaces.

B.P.: This aspect of retreating and recovering from stressful experiences could play a major role; in other words: "Close the door and the world stays outside". But I find it difficult to diagnose something from the home.
If someone has nothing personal in their home, for example, there is sometimes a feeling of neglect. Perhaps their life has sucked them dry so much that they no longer have the energy for it. Or he has cut himself off from his relationship with his surroundings. Perhaps he doesn't have the corresponding need for a home.

VSK: What do you mean, he has no housing needs?

B.P.: There are six different housing needs. Firstly, the need for security, i.e. a functioning lock on the door or curtains or blinds to protect against prying eyes from outside. Most respondents cited the need for relaxation first. This is where privacy is cultivated. The desire for socialising and communication is another point. Self-expression is one aspect of living. The sheer need to shape one's own environment is also an important concern for many. Last but not least, we differ in our aesthetic desires. Some people can't stand it if the picture doesn't match the couch, others need a cosy position on the couch and a good view of the TV. This does not necessarily mean that the person is untidy or that their home is impersonally furnished. Rather, they don't care about the visual design.
These living needs are different for everyone. When I advise my customers, I need to know which needs they have and to what extent.
You can also approach a film character by asking these questions and weighing them up. They come from their personality, from their living history. This now applies to their everyday needs. Quite a lot is possible.

VSK: My last question goes beyond homes and films. From a psychological point of view, are there design rules that apply equally to people in all cultures?

B.P.: Basically, living is culturally characterised. This has to do with the landscape and the climate, among other things. What unites us humans is our common evolutionary heritage. Perception works the same for everyone; it has developed over thousands of years, along with the natural world. This has given rise to our brains, our thinking and our emotions.
This is why we function differently in different environments.
This brings us back to stimuli: we function best in a medium stimulus level, i.e. where there is no deprivation or overstimulation. This corresponds to a natural environment that is not exactly hostile, such as the desert or the Arctic, but an average landscape. We find stimuli that are connected pleasant: you have an overview, but there is also enough to discover.
In general, we perceive types of space differently. In a square room where you are with several people, you feel more cramped than in a rectangular room of the same size. Rooms that you can see through are experienced as more positive. Oversized rooms, i.e. rooms that go beyond the human scale, tend to be experienced as unpleasant. These things basically have an effect on all people. As does the realisation that natural elements are good for us all.
For example, people achieve significantly better results when solving tasks if they have the opportunity to look out of the window or at a picture of nature. This is known as the attention recovery effect: people involuntarily and unconsciously look back and forth between the task and the image while working. This creates a micro-relaxation.
Across cultures all over the world, 4 natural elements are experienced as beautiful: water, trees, views and flowering meadows. This goes back to our evolutionary heritage.
However, when it comes to living requirements and living ideals, there are major cultural differences. How much space you take up, questions of external impact and how many strangers can see from outside. In Amsterdam, you can see into almost every living room from the street, whereas in England and Germany, privacy is very much protected.

VSK: Thank you very much for your food for thought and your view of spaces and people.