How Interiors Shape Us

Cottagecore to Coquette: Notes on the Aesthetic Room

We often treat our rooms as purely functional or decorative (spaces to sleep, study, relax, or entertain), but the rooms we inhabit actively shape and reflect who we are; especially in transitional periods of life, such as university or early adulthood, interiors serve as evolving portraits of self-perception, emotional state, and social identity. A student room, for example, may begin as a blank institutional shell and gradually become a curated environment of books, posters, half-folded laundry, and lampshades angled just so. These choices, whether deliberate or unconscious, are not trivial as they participate in what philosopher Gaston Bachelard called “the topography of our intimate being”- revealing how physical space integrates memory, identity, and thought. Personal interiors function not merely as backdrops to life but as extensions of the self; interiors reflect our internal worlds, reinforce or challenge social norms, and influence how we think, feel, and relate to time.

The link between our internal states and the physical spaces we occupy is well-established in both psychology and philosophy. Environmental psychologists refer to this as place identity- the idea that our surroundings contribute to the construction and reinforcement of self-concept. Gaston Bachelard famously argued in The Poetics of Space that the home is not simply a container for life but a structure deeply entwined with memory, imagination, and emotional life. In his account, the house becomes “the topography of our intimate being”, a claim that resonates powerfully with the affective attachment many feel toward particular rooms, corners, or arrangements of furniture. Likewise, in Carl Jung’s symbolic vocabulary, the house frequently appears in dreams as a metaphor for the psyche, with different rooms corresponding to unconscious or repressed aspects of the self.