The Architecture of Wellbeing: Exploring Wellness Design for Physical and Mental Health.
As a child, Nanna’s house made my skin crawl. It was rude. It was intrusive. Its towers of junk, glued with dust, dirt and dog hair, threatened my safety. Its smells invaded my nostrils.
For Nana, however, her house was a fortress. It kept her safe from the world - a defense against the terrors of undiagnosed mental illness borne from years of a difficult life.
Amongst the junk hid a zephyr of love that only a grandchild could know. But, there was no way I could have understood the depth of her mind’s fracture. In the early 80s there was no popular understanding of the motivations behind “hoarding”.
Instead, I was learning that an invitation into another’s home is an exercise in vulnerability balanced by courage.
For the host, it requires displaying your values, your quirks, your failings, your joys, your achievements. It shows your heart’s light, and its darkness.
I was also learning the nuanced relationship between the built environment, the natural environment and our physical and mental wellbeing.
SPACE AND LANDSCAPE
As a country girl growing up in West Australia’s wheatbelt, I was surrounded by the big sky and its boundless translucent baby-blue light, hot air, crunchy paddocks, fragrant eucalypt and singing Sheoak trees.
At nights, I would lie on my back in the paddocks and bliss-out to the intensity and clarity of the milky-way, un-shrouded by city lights and pollution. The vastness of space and distance living 3 hours from the most isolated capital city earth was humbling.
A career in Interior Architecture and design it seems was an inevitable pathway for me given the lucidity of those memories and their formative influences on my understanding space, both man made and natural
In my early 30s, I chose to take a break and sail the open oceans. I worked absurdly hard and lived in confined spaces with too many people for my liking.
It was on this tangential journey that I became keenly aware of the effects that the hard built environment was having on my soft human mind and body. The confines of a yacht caused me stress, anxiety and mild depression.
THE 90%
Research shows that connection with nature is the most important and effective conduit for healing. But we spend %90 of our lives inside buildings (and cars)* .
”…we are basically an indoor species. In a modern society, total time outdoors is the most insignificant part of the day, often so small that it barely shows up in the total” - WR Ott
It stands to reason that our built environment has the potential to both harm and heal us.
Over the past decade, I have spent my time exploring wellness modalities for my own physical and mental health. I’ve come to recognise that there is a disconnect between the design of healing & wellness spaces and the knowledge (and technologies) available to us as practitioners.
There is also a strong business case to expand our skill set as practitioners.
WELLNESS REAL ESTATE
The Wellness real estate industry is slated to show a market growth increase of $575.9 billion during the 2023-2027 and the global wellness market economy as whole is valued at over $5.3 trillion in 2023.
Project briefs are expanding to include healing spaces. This includes large resorts catering to yoga and meditation, wellness spaces integrated into commercial offices and massage rooms in hospitals.
However, we need to work hard to better understand and interpret the needs of our client base within this market, if we are to offer services that really deliver against the intent of these briefs.
Our clients will also often have knowledge or interest in an array of eastern esoteric knowledge (Feng Shui, Kanso, Vastu). They may also consider building Ecology, biophilia and the nordic Hugge, the burgeoning biophilic movement, environmental psychology, place making and memory making and of course, in Australia, connection to country. All these disciplines offer us rich possibilities in which to design more effective spaces that support human healing whilst satisfying our client’s brief.
THE WELLROOM CO
I created THE WELLROOM CO to meet this need - as a vehicle to help the design community understand and integrate building science, neuroscience and the nuances of esoteric knowledge around how the built environment affects us physically, psychologically. And emotionally. It is driven by the desire to connect diverse sources of information available to us as designers and wellness practitioners, to create spaces that assist healing and health on all levels.
And why “The Wellroom co”? Because “Room” is about giving ourselves sufficient space to move and explore . It’s a space that we are given or give to ourselves as a sanctuary.
And “well”? Looking outside the popular meaning we see the etymological root being “as wished or desired; abundance, full, to spring, rise and gush, to be better”. It’s a desire to be better, to apply an abundance of knowledge to our built environment, (our “%90”), at the same level of curiosity, exploration and vigilance that we apply in our efforts towards personal healing.