Our house

Journalist Winifred Gallagher talks about the urge to nest, suburban sprawl, and whether George Washington owned the first McMansion.

By Sarah Goldstein

Read more: Psychology, Home, Design, Life

Feb. 24, 2006 | Wini Gallagher has a beautiful home. It's the kind of home that makes you want to take your shoes off upon entry, not out of obligation, but because you want to curl up in every chair, light every white candle on the dining room table, even use the fancy toilet. Gallagher's is the kind of home that makes you cringe when thinking of your own dining room table covered with tax returns, your bedroom floor moonlighting as a closet and the substance growing on your bathroom wall that you've left ignored for too many days. What is abundantly clear, both from touring her house and reading her new book, "House Thinking: A Room-by-Room Look at How We Live," is that Gallagher has put a lot of thought into her home -- an act she insists is all that stands between most of us and the domestic sanctuaries of our dreams.

"House Thinking" is neither a how-to book nor a treatise in behavioral science, but instead tells the story of the American home through historical anecdotes, personal narrative and sociological studies. In it Gallagher, 59, draws from the expanding field of environmental psychology to explore how home design can bring out our "best selves." Devoting a chapter to each room of the house, Gallagher explains, for example, that the bedroom is a place for sleep and sex, not a storage closet (though, she admits, when she started the work, that's what hers was fast becoming).

"House Thinking" is also a sequel to Gallagher's first book, "The Power of Place," which looked at the ways that environments affect our behavior by examining everything from the impact of seasons on the Alaska population to the kinds of places that induce drug abuse. While it may be tempting to dismiss environmental psychology as yet another New Age way for high-income families to spend their money, Gallagher's work is grounded in the belief that significant changes can be made at little cost, no matter how humble or luxurious your home. Indeed, on the tour of her own house, Gallagher did not neglect to point out the myriad inexpensive changes she had made -- choices as simple as moving the television from the living room's center to a corner and placing a yard sale couch in the dining room to provide a place to relax after a meal.

I spoke with Gallagher in the living room of her prewar townhouse on Manhattan's Upper West Side about America's ever-expanding suburbs, the birth of vanity, and Eastern versus Western toilet etiquette.

What got you thinking about "House Thinking"?

When I was working on "The Power of Place" there was an enormous concentration -- which there still is -- on how our internal neurochemistry can affect our behavior. And that seemed to me to be very lopsided. I believe that the environment, and not just the social environment but also the physical environment, has a big impact on behavior. And science up until the turn of the 20th century thought that too -- it was so-called geographical medicine. Doctors would tell patients afflicted with melancholy (which we call depression) to go to a sunny place to feel better. It actually works.

Our culture doesn't look at the effects of the environment on behavior. We talk about social relationships and neurochemistry. But it's not just my opinion that environment affects behavior. There's real solid research from environmental psychology, from psychiatry, from design, architecture, cultural history. A Roman doctor in the second century said, "Melancholics are to be laid in the sunshine, for their disease is gloom." The American Psychiatric Association didn't recognize seasonal affective disorder until the '80s, but the ancients recognized it and knew how to treat it. We can actually do much more to improve the quality of our lives for little or no money.

In many low-income communities aren't serious afflictions like asthma and lead poisoning brought on or exacerbated by the environment?

That's something very rarely mentioned when we talk about the consequences of poverty. One of five American kids grows up in poverty, and those children face enormous environmental as well as social and nutritional deficits. There are kids in America who don't have a single nook, much less a room, of their own. Maybe they have one drawer or maybe not even that. They have no place to go to study. There are huge numbers of people living in small places because they can't afford better housing, so everyone's activities have to go on in the same tiny little space. Those are the kinds of situations that really would drive middle-class people crazy. And yet there's an enormous number of kids growing up like this.

Are there environmental "prescriptions" for people living in those situations?

There are things that can be done. For example, in railroad-flat apartments that are common in tenement buildings, there is great potential for creating private nooks and crannies. So a kid could have maybe have one little corner of one of those rooms, a place that's his or her own for a specific period of time. There are lots of simple things like that that don't really cost very much, but we don't think about them, so we don't do them.

But isn't that the sort of thing that requires a family discussion to figure out -- to say, this corner is going to be Junior's and this is Mom's? And it's not possible to have those conversations in every family.

Absolutely. Certainly in New York City there are plenty of middle-class families where kids share a room, and there's nothing wrong with that. It's ideal to have your own room because it gives you more privacy and more control -- things that are very important for the development of the self. But other interesting things can be done. I've been to houses where people put up shower curtains dividing the room down the middle so that if somebody wants to read in bed and somebody wants to go to sleep, they can. There are lots of simple, easy things you can do -- but you can't do them unless you go back to the principle that your environment really does affect your behavior and your behavior means your thoughts, your feelings and your actions.

Next page: Suburbs and big houses are all tied up with our idea of what it is to be free, what it is to be independent