Your Home May Say Something About You

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, a professor of architecture at the University of California-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 that 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 the approach differs with the sexes, she says. 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.