Nature & Beauty

At Haven House and Cloud Nine Studios, the environments have been designed to make their residents feel connected to nature and surrounded by beauty.

Nature

Evidence suggests that Mother Nature provides therapeutic benefits for people healing from trauma. Specifically, spending time around natural materials or looking at nature-based imagery can significantly lower cortisol and stress levels as well as reduce symptoms of anxiety and depression, especially in women. Nature's calming effects can help individuals regulate their emotions and find a sense of peace, which is particularly beneficial for those with trauma who may experience intense emotions. Thinking about nature can encourage mindfulness, allowing individuals to focus on the present moment and release negative thoughts and emotions. To take advantage of all these benefits to help residents heal, Haven House and Cloud Nine Studios have been designed to provide constant exposure to natural elements.

When coming home to Haven House, residents are greeted with magnolia trees and a collection of colorful, fragrant flowers spilling out of the two large planters on either side of the staircase. Beautiful wood from all over the world fills the first room they walk into, taking various forms, all handmade: a solid block of gnarled monkeypod from Thailand that became an art pedestal, a large wall sculpture carved from a slab of acacia from Bali, a bench made from a live edge slab of black walnut from Vermont, three custom art frames handmade from Canadian birdseye maple, six live edge teak shelves, and several turned wood bowls, each made with multiple hardwoods like magnolia, bubinga, African mahogany, and wenge. Throughout the rest of home they'll find wood practically everywhere they look, from the cabinets and the shutters to the solid wood furniture in every room, large windows to let in fresh air and natural light, and artwork made from stone, seashells, driftwood, natural fibers, pressed flowers, and living plants.

Residents coming home to Cloud Nine Studios experience even more natural elements outside as part of the Recovery Pathway, including a running waterfall and the uniquely pleasant sight and aroma of an enormous wall of African jasmine and honeysuckle flowers. Once inside their homes, handmade custom hard maple woodwork is all around, accenting many of areas built for cats: the deep windowsill platforms where cats can lie in the sun, the finished edge of the cat loft, the threshold of the cat door to the litter closet, and the giant catwalk lightrail that wraps around two walls. The kitchen cabinet pulls are made from real driftwood, the convertible desk-beds are made of solid alder, and the huge full-length mirrors are made from live edge walnut, where they hang opposite custom art pieces made from dried moss and flowers. Picture and casement windows maximize natural light while minimizing obstruction, and the apartments on the top floor each have two skylights.

Beauty

Using Beauty to Elevate

A growing body of evidence suggests that surrounding people with beauty can aid in trauma recovery, and is particularly effective for women. Aesthetically pleasing environments can evoke positive emotions, promote relaxation, and reduce stress hormones. This can be especially helpful for trauma survivors who often experience heightened anxiety and difficulty regulating their emotions. Engaging with art provides a non-verbal outlet for processing difficult emotions and memories associated with trauma, and can help individuals to externalize their experiences, gain new perspectives, and rebuild a sense of control and agency.

On a surface level, the way beauty helps is straightforward: Beauty makes people feel good, so we aimed to fill the environment with as much beauty as possible. One of the fundamental design principles followed during the design process was: Anything that can be, should be beautiful; anything that can be, should be art. All furniture and furnishings were evaluated according to the principles of trauma-informed design as well as art objects that contribute to a cohesive aesthetic. At Haven House, we expanded on this by treating the whole home like a gallery, placing paintings and sculpture in practically every available space, sometimes with specific psychological goals in mind.

At Cloud Nine, with little space for paintings or sculpture, art was integrated into the architecture. The custom windowsills use extra-thick slabs of solid wood with elegant, elongated curves to elevate what would otherwise be flat stretches of drywall into functional works of art that are regularly illuminated by sunlight. On each cabinet door is a handmade art piece, with the aforementioned handles crafted from real driftwood and the pulls from hand-blown glass in the form of aquatic creatures. The focal point of the room is not just a television, but a digital art display with access to thousands of paintings and photos of natural scenes, surrounded by a frame hand-crafted from birdseye maple. Whenever possible, functional necessities such as these are used as opportunities to bring more natural materials and beauty into the space.

Using Beauty to Ground

Being surrounded by beauty can elevate mood and even help combat feelings of hopelessness or worthlessness, but having beauty everywhere you look has yet another practical therapeutic application. People recovering from trauma often experience emotional dysregulation, making it difficult to manage intense emotions. During these moments, grounding techniques, especially those involving objects, can be helpful to regain a sense of calm and presence. Sensory grounding strategies typically begin with looking at several objects before moving on to other senses. Seeing multiple beautiful objects can jump start this process with positive emotions, and a particularly visually stimulating object can even short-circuit it, serving as an emotional lightning rod to ground a person immediately.

Each common viewpoint within the home environment was evaluated, and our goal was to ensure at least one tableau or object of beauty is readily visible. From bedrooms and common rooms to the liminal spaces between, even the bathrooms were included, where natural marble mosaics are always visible through the glass shower doors. This way, no matter when or where these moments happen, residents will have immediate access to a sight that can make them feel a little better and serve as a healthy diversion from their internal distress. Plus, even when not in crisis, these elements help to calm the mind and keep people grounded as they move throughout the environment.

Using Beauty to Empower

When furnishing these homes, we aimed to fill them with beauty made by women, and furthermore, when possible, local women. While this may sound like an initiative to support the people who made the art and décor items, the primary goal was to help the women who would be living with these objects.

Objects of great beauty inspire awe—a powerful emotion that we can harness and redirect to empower the awestruck. For example, when residents first move into Haven House, they can't help but notice the beauty everywhere, but will typically be too preoccupied with other thoughts and emotions to focus on it. However, after they settle into their new home and make progress in therapy, some residents will become curious and use Artist Connections to learn more about some of the objects that have caught their attention.

This is an intentional setup: Haven House is full of objects of such rare and remarkable beauty that it can be surprising that so many of them were made by people with whom residents have a lot in common. This is where the awe is transformed into self-efficacy, because the more the residents can identify with the artists—the closer they both are in background, personality, age, location, i.e., the more the residents think "she's just like me"—the more likely they may be compelled to visualize themselves doing exactly what the artists did. And since what the artists did was amazing, suddenly people struggling with self-efficacy can find themselves visualizing doing something amazing of their own, which can have a profound therapeutic effect. (Read about the Journey Gallery for the most extensive application.)

While this strategy has dozens more opportunities to work at Haven House, the residents of Cloud Nine Studios are set up for the most effective version of it. Walking along the Recovery Pathway every time they come home, there is no escaping the Lunar Beacon, which evokes awe not just for its beauty, but also because it's a 12-foot disc that's 20 feet above the ground and seems to reflect light that isn't there—even professional artists and engineers have to take a pause to think about how it was done. When residents eventually discover the link to the video that explains this piece and introduces the artist, and they learn that this otherworldly behemoth that dominates the entire property was made not by some industrial team but by Christine, who lives on a nearby farm full of rescue animals and who probably has a lot more in common with them than they'd have ever guessed, this calculated psychological sneak attack can jolt them into rethinking what's possible in their own lives.