What the Mind Needs: The Secret Psychology of Wainscoting
Have you ever visited an old hotel or office building and were surprised by how cozy and timeless it felt, imparting a sense of gravity and calm? That’s not just due to feeling a sense of its history, but also the very materials and aesthetics of the building itself — of being in a place built with real materials (wood, stone), and heavy use of decoration on fixtures and trimming, incorporated even in functional items like knobs and heating grates.
This isn’t just a subjective experience. Numerous studies suggest that humans prefer being in spaces with decoration and natural materials, increasing focus, mood stability, and overall well-being. There are also studies that a lack of these qualities tends to induce the opposite, such as fatigue and distractedness (some citations below).
You’ll see that especially in the use of wainscoting — wood lining or paneling, usually running along the lower level of the wall, often with intricate decorative patterns. While all this may seem like extraneous frilliness from an older era, there’s a hidden history of why it exists — and why it went away. In modern buildings, you may not notice a lack of decoration consciously, but your body can often feel its absence.
Originally, wainscoting was used to protect walls from damage, preventing scuffing and dents from chairs, boots, and general wear-and-tear. This was especially important in high-traffic areas like hallways and dining rooms. In older homes, especially in cold climates, wainscoting also provided an extra layer of insulation on drafty walls.
But in addition to its functionality, we now know wainscoting has a very important visual effect on the mind. The wainscoting helps produce leading lines, which help situate people within a space, drawing the eye horizontally across a room and into the distance. It gives a visual anchor or baseline, creating a sense of stability and orientation in a room. By breaking up the vertical height of a wall, it gives your body a point of reference. If you’re in an old home or office building, and you feel a sense of groundedness, it’s often the wainscoting that’s helping make this possible.
In the middle of the 20th century, and the end of Art Deco, the last great decorative era of architecture, wainscoting began to disappear from buildings. By the 60s, the term itself seemed so quaint, it was joked about in a Monty Python sketch. But this was not specifically due to a shift in styles or taste. And because the end of wainscoting and other interior decoration has been so detrimental to human wellness, it’s worth taking a quick look at this history.
War and Wainscoting
For perhaps the first time in Europe’s long history of conflict, World War II involved heavy bombardment of civilian centers. With the end of the war, and the need to quickly rebuild entire cities, wainscoting, moldings, and other “decorative” elements were de-emphasized.
By then, the notion that decoration was superfluous or decadent in architecture had become common in design, perhaps first articulated by Adolf Loos, an Austrian architect and theorist. In his landmark 1910 lecture, published in 1913 “Ornament and Crime”, Loos depicted it as culturally regressive, economically wasteful, even immoral. To evolve as a culture, he argued, we must eliminate ornamentation from useful objects.
The essay became a cornerstone of modernist thought, influencing architects like Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus movement.
These arguments emerged from the specific pressures Loos felt around him. Austria and the Austria Hungarian empire were producing some of the most decorative spaces in the world. You can go to Austria today and see how much of this has been preserved.
Given this overwhelming decorative saturation, it’s understandable why Loos felt alarmed, convinced that ornamentation had spiraled into excess with no apparent limit. So it’s no wonder he saw no end to this, and was alarmed, writing, “The evolution of culture marches with the elimination of ornament from useful objects.”
I just got back from Austria, where I got to see some of this “excessive decoration” firsthand.
He believed that ornamentation led to objects becoming outdated too quickly; from a political standpoint, he argued that adding intricate patterns to products increased labor time and material costs, further slowing economic progress. It’s why he likened ornament to “a ‘crime’ against society.”
But with the benefit of time, we can see what Loos missed: Throughout all history, every culture has designed beautiful, ornamented spaces. When we look at antiques, there’s a sense of timelessness to them. The great irony in Loos’ claim, that ornamentation dates objects, is that older objects — and buildings — actually last longer, and maintain their appeal throughout successive eras. These objects don’t seem outdated, because most of their decorative patterns are based on nature, and nature never goes out of date.
In contrast, it’s quite possible that when future historians look back at our modern era, roughly from the end of World War 2 to now, they’ll view our relative lack of decoration and natural material use not as an aesthetic choice, but as a collective trauma response to a devastating global war.
Why We Need to Build Our Way Out of Flatness
We know the history of how flatness came to dominate our work and home lives; we also know the mental effects of flatness. Today we experience undifferentiated tall white walls, especially in new buildings in the United States and the EU. The lack of decoration and ornamentation is so severe, looking like industrial environments, or art galleries without paintings.
Its mental effect on our wellness and productivity has been documented in multiple studies; for instance:
“Subsequently walking in a nature reserve initially fostered blood pressure change that indicated greater stress reduction than afforded by walking in the urban surroundings. Performance on an attentional test improved slightly from the pretest to the midpoint of the walk in the nature reserve [emphasis mine], while it declined in the urban setting.” — Terry Hartiga, Gary W. Evansb, Larry D. Jamnerc, Deborah S. Davis, Tommy Garling [PDF link]
Architecture Critic Sarah Goldhagen’s research showed that, from a neuroscience perspective, integrating elements like sunlight, fresh air circulation, organic building materials, and plant life into building design can help lower stress levels, boost work performance, and enhance general well-being. Goldhagen points out that even basic design choices — such as how windows are positioned, the height of ceilings, and the feel of different materials — can significantly influence occupants’ emotions and their interactions within those environments. Williams Goldhagen, S. (2019). Welcome to Your World: How the Built Environment Shapes Our Lives. (New York: Harpercollins. Pp.282–291)
I’m hopeful that we’ll see a return to ornamentation and natural materials in buildings. For homes and offices which already exist, we can also add back in sensory design to these spaces. Integrating any sort of fractal, nature, or natural substances in a space can have positive effects, especially for office environments without natural settings or recess periods where people can take a walk outdoors.
Returning Texture to Our Home & Business Spaces
Here’s a starting check list for retrofitting flat spaces:
- Add wooden wainscoting to break up the monotony with harmonious lines (here’s a fun DIY guide)
- Add natural materials such as wood and stone
- Reduce C02 by increasing ventilation in the space and ensuring ventilation efficiency
- Add real (or fake) plants of high quality, and moss walls for green fractals
- Ensure natural daylight is present in meeting rooms, and if not, some sort of texture or natural material to break up the smooth flatness
- Consider lime wash for some spaces (a natural C02 absorber and a provider of natural, soothing texture)
- Install flicker-free high CRI (color rendering index) lighting in Daylight tones for spaces without access to natural light to preserve the color rendering of the people within them.
- Ensure there are views with nature or plants outside common windows
Some of the expansion of flatness in our lives arose our of post-war necessity, but this history does not need to be our future. As we face new traumas and conflicts in our present, here’s to a future of natural texture.
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