Home and Interior Design Hobbies

Introduction

You might recognize the sensation from visits to a friend’s house – the feeling that a space is good for you. Perhaps it is a sense of profound relaxation as if you left your worries at the door.How interior design can boost your mental and physical health | New Scientist

Spaces have a profound effect on us, and a crucial effect on our well-being. This has been acknowledged for thousands of years. This understanding is encompassed in the ancient Chinese traditional practice of Feng shui, and is becoming more recognized in our modern society.

The impact of spaces on wellness is being appreciated as never before.
Design for Health and Wellbeing | British Institute of Interior Design

And yet, for as long as it has been appreciated, it is often overlooked. This is many times the case even for our most important space – our home. While we do sometimes invest substantial time, and money in its initial design, this effort is usually led by cognition, or conventions, rather than our own feelings:

We’ve been optimizing our environments too much for our cognitive mind in recent years, and we need to ignite our senses and bring more awareness to what feels good rather than what we think.
How to decorate for happiness and mental wellbeing | House & Garden

There is much more to the feeling of home:

What does it mean to be in command of space, to feel at home in it? It means that the objective reference points in space, such as landmarks and the cardinal positions, conform with the intention and the coordinates of the human body.
Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience
— University of Minnesota Press

Hobbies can provide us an opportunity to become more mindful of our space and how it makes us feel. Through interior-design-related hobbies, we can adjust our spaces to accord and enhance our sensations.

[…] inner environments could aim to stimulate experiences that provide pleasure and meaning to their inhabitants.
Design for subjective well-being in interior architecture