When I head to a café to get work done, especially when I’m travelling, I look for a particular kind of seat.

A banquette along the wall is my first choice. A table by the window comes a close second.

The one I’ll avoid if I can is the table in the middle of the room, the one people squeeze past on their way to the counter. I can work there, but I never quite settle.

The worst version of this was back in my office days. We hot-desked, and the desk I dreaded sat beside the walkway everyone used to get to the kitchen and break room. People passed behind me all day, and every time someone did, part of my attention went with them.

There’s a name for what I was feeling: prospect and refuge.

Prospect is being able to see what’s going on around you. Refuge is having something at your back, so you don’t feel exposed. The café banquette gives you both, while that desk by the walkway gave me neither.

The geographer Jay Appleton put the idea forward in the 1970s, arguing that we’re drawn to places where we can see trouble coming without being easily seen ourselves.

The same instinct at home

At home the feeling is gentler, but it doesn’t switch off. You can even see it at the scale of a whole house. In A Pattern Language, Christopher Alexander describes an “intimacy gradient,” with the more public rooms near the entrance and the bedrooms and private spaces further in, away from the street.

Most of us can’t rearrange rooms, but the same thinking applies to a single seat.

I see it all the time with armchairs. A perfectly comfortable chair ends up floating in the open or right on the route to the kitchen, and nobody sits in it.

Usually there’s nothing wrong with the chair. People just don’t enjoy sitting where it’s been put.

Family Home by Nickey Kehoe Design (left) & Jessica Helgerson Interior Design

Move it beside a wall or a bookcase, out of the walkway, and angle it towards the room.

A window is one of the best spots for this, because you get daylight and a view out with the wall beside you. When I put a comfortable armchair by my window, it quickly became one of my favourite places to write in the morning.

Desks are worth checking too. A lot of people push theirs flat against a wall, which leaves their back to the door. It’s a milder version of my old walkway desk.

If you can, turn it side-on to the door so a quick glance tells you who’s coming in.

Where your bed goes

My own bed is set up so I can see the door, and I suspect a lot of yours are too.

In a 2010 study called Sleeping in Safe Places, researchers asked 138 people to arrange the furniture on bedroom floor plans, without telling them what to prioritise. Even so, 83% placed the bed with a view of the door, and people tended to put it further from the entrance.

If your bed doesn’t have that view, try shifting it so you can see the doorway without lying directly in line with it.

Before you buy anything new

When a room doesn’t feel right, most people’s first instinct is to replace something. I’d try moving what you already have first.

Pick the seat you spend the most time in and ask yourself two questions. Can I see the room and the door from here? And is there something solid behind me? If either answer is no, move it before you buy anything. It costs nothing, and it often changes how a room feels more than a new piece of furniture would.

This is one of nine ideas from my latest video on the psychology behind homes that feel good, from lighting to the things you choose to display. If you’d rather watch than read:

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Cheers,
Reynard