Choice, Comfort, & Privacy

Choice, comfort, and privacy are crucial aspects of trauma-informed care and recovery. When people have experienced trauma, they often feel a loss of control and a diminished sense of agency. Reintroducing these elements into their environment and interactions can empower people and foster healing by increasing their sense of autonomy and self-efficacy.

Choice

As a key component of self-efficacy is control over one's environment, these environments have been designed to give residents broad control over them. As much as possible, rooms have been designed to be flexible environments that can be adapted to a resident's preferences and needs.

Even though fully furnished, all residents can radically change the appearance and mood of their environment by selecting and placing objects from the Décor Library or by changing what is shown on their Digital Art Displays. Those in Cloud Nine Studios and certain rooms at Haven House can also change the color of accent lighting to suit their tastes.

In some cases, vast control is given over the layout and function of entire rooms. The best example is found in the single rooms at Haven House and all of Cloud Nine Studios, where custom convertible desk-beds give residents the power to transform their space between a bedroom and an office in just a few seconds. In a more traditional example, the living room at Haven House is designed to be flexible, with all modular furniture that can be rapidly changed between numerous layouts. This empowers everyone in the home to easily configure the living room for their own purposes without infringing on anyone else's ability to do so.

Comfort

The location does much of the work here. San Diego has one of the most ideal climates in the world and is naturally comfortable for most people, most of the time. High-powered HVAC units, which are in every bedroom in Haven House and all of Cloud Nine Studios, allow residents to fine-tune their environment to their exact preferred temperature within minutes.

Residents also have significant control over the light in their environment. All rooms in both facilities feature dimmable recessed light fixtures. For most residents of Haven House and all residents of Cloud Nine Studios, the lights in their rooms also feature gimbals, so their direction can be customized as well. Plus, all bedroom windows have either shutters or shades to control natural light.

Privacy

Once again, the location does much of the work, as the area is quiet and private.

Even in a group living facility, Haven House provides privacy to its residents. All bedroom doors have a heavy-duty deadbolt and are made of solid wood, which provides significant sound dampening that is further enhanced by the heavy mirrors attached to the insides of them. In double occupancy rooms, each roommate has multiple pieces of storage furniture for their exclusive use.

At Cloud Nine Studios, to enhance privacy between fellow residents, many measures have been taken to reduce sound between the apartments. and all windows have both translucent light-filtering and opaque light-blocking options. Furthermore, all apartments have their own washers and dryers, which is nearly unheard of in a studio of this size, preventing residents from having to take their clothes out of their home to launder them.

However, the level of privacy at Cloud Nine Studios is extraordinary and goes far beyond these mundane details.

To begin, the building itself is mostly hidden from the street, which has no through traffic, and the entry gate is camouflaged; all of Cloud Nine is designed to be easily missed by those who don't already know it's there. Access to the building requires passage through an airlock formed by two high-security gates. Once through these, the Cloud Nine grounds are heavily insulated from the outside world, and with only nine total residents, they are usually completely quiet except for the sounds of the waterfall and local songbirds. (Read about the Recovery Pathway to learn more about the experience of coming home to Cloud Nine Studios.)

The entry doors for each apartment feature both automatic and manual deadbolts, which can be used separately or together. Visitors who wish to gain access can make requests via a video intercom at the outside gate. There, residents can choose to grant them access through both gates, or just the outer gate in case they would prefer to have deliveries left in the secure airlock area. Visitors granted full access can still be screened using another video intercom mounted to the front door of each unit—whether they are home or not—giving residents an extreme level of privacy and great control over how they manage it.

Striking a Balance

The elements of choice, comfort, and privacy frequently intersect with each other as well as with harmony. Sometimes they all rise together; however, when one person's choice or comfort costs someone else their own, that creates an untenable scenario with a clear winner and loser. Finding a way to give residents more power over their own environment without disturbing anyone else can be a challenge.

A simple problem that encompasses all of these elements: Two people share a room, and one wants to go to sleep while her roommate does not. The same bedside table lamp that would give one person choice and comfort would take choice, comfort, and even privacy away from another. What's worse, in group living environments, win-lose scenarios such as this are actually win-lose-lose, since conflicts between any two people often spill over to create disharmony in the rest of the household as well.

However, win-win-win solutions are sometimes possible, and we endeavored to find as many as we could. In one case, the solution was to increase the capacity of the water heaters at both facilities to effectively provide endless hot water, allowing all residents to take long showers or draw full baths as they please without impacting any other resident's power to do so. In another case, the solution was to use enterprise-level security appliances to give each apartment at Cloud Nine Studios its own fully partitioned and isolated network.

In the case of the roommates with different bedtimes, some carefully chosen furniture and fixtures did the trick at Haven House, as illustrated in the photos below. Here you can see how, between the wings of the headboard and a directional lamp, one person can stay up with plenty of light for reading or other activities, while her roommate can sleep without any light bothering her. In this way, each person can control her own environment without disturbing the other's choice, comfort, or privacy, preserving harmony within a shared home.