How Sensory Interior Design Evolved through Art, Massage and Neuroscience

Veronica often cried during her massage. She couldn’t tell me why. She would get on my table and the tears would start flowing, soaking through the face cradle cover and dripping onto the carpet. I was careful to have a full box of tissues handy.

Holding space for tough emotions is part of the job description for any massage therapist. Neurologically speaking, emotions are a physical manifestation of a learning process; they’re a huge part of how we make sense of our experience. A massage studio is a safe place to allow those emotions to move through our bodies, if the massage therapist creates it to be.

When Veronica started coming for massage, I was recovering from a firestorm in my own life. During the previous twenty years, I was a globe-trotting professional artist—the kind without a trust fund or a wealthy spouse. I got my furniture out of dumpsters, founded ‘alternative’ art spaces in San Francisco and New York, designed my own residency in Mexico, made art full time and accepted just enough massage clients to keep the lights on.

At the start of the Great Recession, my child was born and their father became semi-permanently unemployed. Art did not provide. In 2010 we left New York for my mother-in-law’s Philadelphia basement, and massage became my full-time business.

Then in 2012, Veronica told me she loved the way my massage studio was set up—particularly the blue mandala over the table—and asked if I would paint her staircase risers. I said no. I was done with art.

“I’ll write you a check for a deposit,” she insisted. I said okay.

Veronica had a vision: “I want the living room to feel like it’s under water.” She had picked several shades of blue and teal for the walls, and she wanted the three-story row house to shift from blue to teal to yellow as you ascended the stairs. “Done,” I said. Over the next few weeks we created a studio salon in her living room; as we worked we swapped stories, listened to music, drank wine, and discussed the progress of her stairs, just as artists have done for generations.

It was joyous.

A Transformative Art Experience

Research tells us that when we spend money on experiences, they bring us more lasting joy than simply buying objects. (Van Boven & Gilovich, “To Do or to Have? That Is the Question,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2003.) An adventure, a class, a project or a retreat connects us with others, forms our sense of identity, and resists social comparisons—our adventure is not like anyone else’s.

Veronica didn’t commission an art object. She and I co-created an art experience. For years afterward, she referred to her stairs as “the soul of the house.” Our collaboration sent both our lives in new and healing directions. She moved through her ambiguous grief, accepted a commission to Puerto Rico, met the love of her life, started a family, and discovered a passion for narrating audio books (and is currently working on mine.)

I founded Practical Sanctuary. Working with Veronica showed me what my painting career had lacked—meaningful personal connection. Instead of working alone in my studio, creating objects without homes, I re-dedicated my hard-earned design skills to the service of specific people.

From the very beginning, Practical Sanctuary focused on interior design as a collaborative experience, not a traditional commercial service. This wasn’t conscious planning, but an organic extension of my values. I’d never organized my life around buying expensive stuff—how could I earn a living by selling it?

Everything Useful Can Also Be Beautiful

The great designer William Morris said that good design means “having nothing in your home which you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.” A Practical Sanctuary design principle is that everything useful can also be beautiful, as long as it is framed correctly. Over the next few years, my massage practice extended into a design practice centered around healing environments, among them a private physical therapy gym and a personal training studio.

Neurodiversity Enters the Chat

At the end of 2013, my beloved brother-in-law, the architect Leif Weaver, passed away from a rare form of lymphoma. Toward the end of his life we came to understand that much of his genius stemmed from his neurodivergence—and his architecture career was profoundly informed by this.

After he passed, my sister and I collaborated to complete the house in Maine he designed and built. This was better training in Sensory Interior Design than any academic program, given that such a program did not yet exist. Not only did Leif design the house to support the way his nervous system processed information, but to reflect his study of permaculture and sustainability.

Developing Space Therapy: Core Principles

With every new client, we continued to distill the Space Therapy framework. Certain core principles emerged, extending from values of equity and sustainability, healing practice, creating and exhibiting art, and studying psychology and neuroscience, with a focus on pain relief and neurodiversity.

Core Principle #1: Your Needs Are Not Negotiable.

Time after time, we encounter situations where some members of a family tacitly sacrifice their own needs—for time, rest, quiet, exercise, cherished projects—in service to others. Children’s needs take priority, but when a parent or caregiver is chronically pushed to exhaustion, the situation is not sustainable. People are interdependent. When a caregiver collapses, the whole system fails.

Everyone’s needs matter equally. Your needs include physical and emotional safety, rest, exercise, time and space to do the things you love.

Resources like time, space, money and attention are always limited. Often you have good reasons for pushing through a lack of them. This brings us to our second principle: commit to solving for everyone’s needs.

Core Principle #2: Assume There Is a Solution.

We fail to solve 100% of the problems we don’t recognize or acknowledge. The biggest barrier to solving a problem is assuming that it can’t be solved. Once we change that assumption, we actively look for solutions that fit within the available resources, and magic happens.

What this looks like in practice: clients declare that they don’t have the time, space, money or bandwidth to do the thing they want or need. After going through their space, possessions, budget and timeline with a ruler, a layout app, and some creative ingenuity, we find what they need to do the thing. Nearly every time.

Core Principle #3: Your Body Knows the Truth.

The design process itself should bring joy, at least some of the time. If it doesn’t, something must change. As a massage therapist I learned that emotions are not separate from physical sensations. When you pay attention to how you feel in your body when you contemplate a design decision—a color palette, a layout, an art selection—you’ll get a more accurate assessment than making a list of pros and cons and conducting a ‘rational’ analysis.

Paying attention to how your body responds to an idea, situation or decision is called somatics. This is particularly necessary when you grapple with anxiety, PTSD and health issues of all kinds. When your needs and boundaries have been ignored and violated in the past, it requires conscious retraining and nervous system support to create a space that truly feels safe and good.

We build that nervous system support into every step of the process, not just the end result.

For a detailed guide to understanding your nervous system, identifying and solving design problems, see my book, The Eccentric Genius Habitat Intervention: Interior Design for Highly Sensitive People. Available in e-book and paperback.

“I was in a slump with my surroundings because I was beginning to feel that yeah it’s nice and all but what’s the point? This book gives you the reminders that help you remember the point. If I quoted all of my favorite impactful parts of the book, I’d be breaking some kind of copyright laws with the amount alone. Thank you for writing this highly motivating, poignant, validating book. It will be a staple reference book for both my personal and professional life.” –B.R., Amazon review

The Space Therapy Diagnostic Framework

One of my first jobs out of college was reference librarian. Working at the reference desks of major academic and public libraries taught me that people often need help asking the right questions to meet their needs. They would arrive with a deceptively simple question like “where’s the history section?”

I learned the hard way to ask follow up questions. They might need a book about William the Conqueror (biography, second floor), an overview of agricultural practices at the turn of the twentieth century (science and technology, third floor) or a book on the Victorian houses of San Francisco (architecture, fourth floor, or San Francisco History Room, sixth floor), and guessing would get us both in trouble. “Can you tell me more? Are you working on a project? Is there a particular book you’re looking for?”

This skill has come in handy ever since.

Step 1: Identify Your Real Needs and Goals

When you come to Practical Sanctuary, we never assume we know what your needs are until we have determined exactly what you’re struggling with, what your priorities are, and where you’re stuck. We’ll ask you to take us on a tour of your space, virtually or in person, and ask questions. “Tell me about this area, object, decision. What’s the story behind it? What’s working and what isn’t? How do you feel about that?”

Once we have been through this first diagnostic pass, we identify your underlying set of specific goals, and the reasons for selecting those goals. We check in with you to make sure we are on the same page, and give you a chance to add or change anything that doesn’t feel right.

We don’t want you buying that $5K couch until we’re sure it’s the best way to invest your budget.

Step 2: Establish Boundaries

One of the most common problems we see in working with families and companies is blurry or nonexistent physical boundaries that make it difficult for everyone to get their real needs met. A parent who works from home lacks an office with a door they can close, shutting out noise and interruptions. Craft projects and paperwork flood the dining room table. Laundry takes over the living room. Exercise equipment blocks library access, and none of it is ever used.

These failures of boundaries are not failures of character. Defining spaces with intention can free up a lot of physical and emotional bandwidth for handling routine aspects of daily life. When we clarify what each space is for and set it up to support that function, problems that seemed intractable can dissolve overnight.

Step 3: Tackle High ROI Interventions First.

Once we have identified goals and established boundaries, it’s easier to decide where to start. A high priority intervention might be anything—decluttering, acoustic baffling, lighting, color or layout. It might not even be the issue you originally came to us for. It will be something we surfaced together during diagnostics, and it will fundamentally change the way you interact with your space.

When you’re making changes to your space, one shift will determine many other decisions. Trying to do everything at once is guaranteed to create overwhelm and decision fatigue. Picking a high priority first step makes every subsequent decision easier and more fun.

Step 4: Build Aesthetics Around Your Values.

Some of my clients have been burned by previous battles with interior designers, who made unilateral design decisions and then offered to ‘explain why it works.’ Usually these decisions involved the client forking over a hefty commission on objects they didn’t want or need.

Cringe.

Don’t get me wrong: as a former fine artist, I can be very opinionated about aesthetics. My opinions do not give me the right to override your judgment. I’m not living inside your home or your nervous system. (See Core Principle #3: Your body knows the truth.) What’s important is how you feel around a certain color, art object, style, or theme.

Your space is constantly sending cues to your subconscious mind about who you are, what you are working toward, where you have been. The space around you works on a physical level (light, acoustics, texture, function), emotional level (color, narrative), and even a spiritual one (ancestry, community). All of these levels must work together to tell a coherent story that nurtures your unique nervous system.

You are the person who informs and determines these cues. Not me or my artistic ego.

Where my art experience comes in handy is in analyzing the physics of your choices in an aesthetic context. This helps me referee differences of aesthetic opinion among family members. Breaking down a choice in terms of value, hue, style, composition and narrative association gives them something clearer to discuss than “I just don’t like it.”

What this looks like in practice: Elizabeth loves a brightly colored area rug; her partner Sam isn’t sure about it. They ask if it will work in their living room. My response: it doesn’t necessarily clash, but how does everyone feel about magenta?

Sam is not fond of magenta. Since it’s a common room, Sam gets veto power. (See Core principle #1: Everyone’s needs matter equally.) We find another rug with similar energy, in colors that everyone likes. Elizabeth gets a magenta rug for her office.

We don’t see your design as a blank canvas to be filled with a signature style. We see it as an organic blossoming of seeds that already exist within you. 

Step 6: Build Evergreen Design Structures

Your design process is never one and done. As we work together, we create systems for making design decisions that you can return to again and again. Your interactive albums, personalized plans, processes and style preferences live in the cloud for you to refer to whenever you need to make a change, want to add a new element, expand or downsize.

We have clients who have made multiple international moves since we first began working together. With every move, they become more confident about making decisions, less stressed about the moving process, and more comfortable in each new home—even if it’s a 6 week rental in New Zealand.

Our intention is not to keep collecting a percentage of each new redecoration. It’s to provide the lifelong joy of feeling at home in your habitat, and enjoying every step of the process.