Designing for Emotion: Why the Best Spaces Make You Feel Something Before You Understand It

The best design doesn’t start with style. It starts with feeling.

Before we ever lay a paver, strike a chalk line, or open a modeling program, we ask one simple but powerful question: What should this space make someone feel?

Calm. Awe. Purposeful. Energized. Productive. Seclusion. Passion.

These aren’t coincidental outcomes, meaningless and detached from the experience of one’s surroundings. They’re materials—just as much as concrete, steel, and stone. We shape with emotion the same way we shape with mass and line. Because spaces that move us don’t just work visually. They work viscerally.

Emotion Before Logic

We feel well before we see and much earlier than we interpret. Long before a client processes the details of a design, they feel the impact of it. A compressed entry flanked by tall masonry creates a moment of pause. A sudden reveal of an open water surface expands the breath. A cool bench in deep shade on a summer afternoon offers unexpected relief—and gratitude. Ordered rows of foliage suggest a kind of rural privacy and seclusion.

These moments are not accidents. They are orchestrated through compression and release, contrast and stillness, sun and shadow. Every action elicits an equal and necessarily complimentary—even if opposing—reaction. Every change in grade, every intentional, ordered row of plantings, every surface material is a decision made to evoke a state of being.

We aren’t just laying out a yard, plotting a pool, or stacking masonry. We’re composing an experience. Orchestrating a symphony of emotion and response as much mortar and stone.

Memory in the Material

We once designed a courtyard where a single olive tree stood between swaying shadows and open sky. Guests don’t always know why they slow down in that space. But they do.

Some of the most powerful tools when considering emotional design—which is really where all design lives, in the heart before the head—come from material itself. The cool grain of travertine beneath bare feet at dusk. The scent of creosote on a monsoon wind, caught in the recess of a shaded overhang. The way bronze ages in the rain, darkening with time like leather passed down, presence and permanence implied and felt.

We often draw from these emotional cues when selecting finishes, even if unknowingly. A modern concrete bench might be softened by the luster of smooth plaster, allowed to proffer a more rustic appeal left natural and sealed with oil, or grounded in time and location by a native stone. Each materialist choice is a way of anchoring memory into place. Our memories are often tethered to what we remembered feeling in that place, during that time, and who we loved or loathed in that time.

Because memory and material are often inseparable, but so too with imagination. The right texture can feel like the bedding of your childhood home. The right sound will take you to your lakeside cabin listening to the rain pattering off the tin roof of wood shed that shields your evening firewood. The cozied warmth of soft white light spilling out from under the open framing of a pergola before the desert night evoking imaginings of an exotic oasis encampment and somewhere you’ve never been and always belonged. Material is everything. It is tactile and visual. It is the anchor for memory and experience. It is presence and physicality, while also the catalyst for the intangible and unknown.

Presence Through Design

Great design doesn’t ask for your attention. It earns your presence.

It invites stillness without demanding it, while later serving as a guide for the experience of a space, directing movement and view through both real and implied lines. It leaves space for silence. It is at times loud and inescapable. It allows for emotion without dictating the terms.

In our work, we often resist the pressure to over-explain or over-decorate. The goal is not to dazzle. It’s to center. To create a space so attuned to its environment and the experiences of those who exist within that it feels like it was always there, intentional, permanent, and timeless—woven into the memories that came before and guiding the creation of the ones still to come.

That’s why we don’t design for the scroll. We design for the soul.

To learn more about how OHPLC uses emotion as a building material, check out our work on IG @ohplc_designandbuild and YouTube at @ohplc.