Earlier this week, I had a piece in The Bulwark in praise of nooks and crannies in the design of homes and towns:

Not long after my wife and I were married in 2018, I found myself thinking a lot about this. Her parents came to stay for a couple of weeks and were doing most of the cooking for us. (I usually do the cooking in our home.) For the first time in years, I was able to come home from work and relax until dinner was ready. It reminded me of being a kid again, back in my parents’ house. And that got me thinking about how that feeling of comfort and relaxation might be related to the actual, physical layout of the house.

I thought about how a quirky floor plan, like a classic town, engages your brain: textures, hiding places, closets under the stairs, crawl spaces, semi-finished basements, awkward corners. I wonder to what extent the fun times I remember from visits to friends’ houses in childhood had to do with the layout of their houses.

For example:

There was my best friend’s dim, quasi-finished basement, with all its advantageous positions for hide and seek. (Under the desk holding the obsolete computer, or behind the stack of cast-off tube televisions packed under the staircase.) I remember his odd L-shaped room, and the funny little corner area under his L-shaped desk where one of us would always hole up during a sleepover. These slightly uncanny spaces sparked something in my young imagination: They were caves, tunnels, undiscovered spaces. You could be an explorer in your own house.

I write about how older towns and neighborhoods have a lot of analogous spaces—for lack of a better way of putting it, they feel richly textured and ever so slightly random. They aren’t places that were built, as Strong Towns puts it, all at once to a finished state. New and old buildings or lots produce interesting spaces where they meet up; older buildings with multiple additions or renovations can end up with very interesting exteriors or floorplans. That kind of thing. I mentioned this in this post on the historic town of Occoquan, Virginia. And here’s a photo from George Washington’s Mount Vernon I snapped several years ago, which brought up this fondness for nooks and crannies:

Now as a homeowner, maybe you don’t want that. Old houses that have been worked on over the years might be fun and interesting to explore, but they can be a maintenance nightmare. I guess to some extent, being a child means being able to experience the world without responsibilities. It’s interesting that one of the only times in my adult life that I’ve felt some of that sense of enchantment were those couple of weeks when my wife’s parents did the cooking. But at the same time, I think you can do a lot to make yourself feel at home—and the building can do a lot to that end as well.

Later on in the piece, I compare modern floorplans and buildings—open, sleek, blank, lacking in those textures and odd spaces—to modern consumer electronics. In my opinion, a lot of modern devices today suffer from the same lack of ornamentation, texture, and opportunities for consumer input. Most of what happens in modern devices is invisible and inaccessible to an average person.

For example, I very much dislike large, blank touchscreen devices. An old-school mouse and keyboard—clacking keys, heavy mouse ball—made you feel like the captain of a ship, like you were in command. A modern screen makes me a feel a little bit uneasy, like the device is trying to pull me into a portal, trying to erode every bit of friction or work that might once have made you put the thing down. It’s hard to explain.

Think about the design of old stereo equipment. A model from the 1970s, say, would likely have been encased in real (or faux) wood. The analogue radio dial would have been lit warmly by an actual light bulb. The control panel would have been full of dials and switches and buttons that clicked and clacked and turned and pushed and snapped. There was something about that design that engaged you, that invited you to do some of the work.

I wonder how much of this is just nostalgia for the sorts of things I grew up around, and how much of it might have some deeper or more “real” basis? Take a look at this bit from Charles Marohn of Strong Towns, on what he calls “spooky wisdom.” He’s talking about Pompeii here, but this is one of his go-to insights about urban design:

Biologists call this wall-hugging trait “thigmotaxis.” Think of a mouse scurrying along the edge of a wall, instinctively fearful of journeying into the center of the room. Humans have that same propensity. Darwin called evolution a “conservative process” in that it conserves winning strategies and builds on them. At some point in the very distant past, thigmotaxis was a winning strategy. The alignment of the buildings along the street in Pompeii comforted that primal urge.

In other words, there might be something about “nooks and crannies” that does, in fact, engage our brain at some subconscious level. When my friend and I bundled up in the awkward corner under his desk, maybe we were doing something that millions of years of evolution had programmed into us. Spooky.

Also check out this interesting piece raising the possibility that modern buildings and urban design have something to do with rising rates of depression. I have no idea if that’s true, but it’s an interesting hypothesis.

I’ll leave you with one more thing, a comment I got on the original Bulwark piece on Twitter:

And I’ll end by asking you what you think of all this. If you grew up in that sort of modern home, do you feel nostalgia for it, the way I feel nostalgia for the janky closet under the stairs? If you’ve studied psychology or architecture or both (or if you haven’t!), what do you think of the notion that people have some sort of innate preference for traditional architecture or urban design, broadly understood? Leave a comment!

Related Reading:

The Path of Most Desire

New Construction Blues

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