My Dream Office Was a Lie

With the second single-family house I built for my family and myself, I wanted to perfect my dream office. It was supposed to have a big desk and modern furniture that nevertheless, through its materials, radiated naturalness, and of course a view of nature. Everything was to turn out exactly as I imagined it. I sat down with the architect and we built it exactly that way.

I sat down in my new office, completely ready to receive inspiration and creativity. Ready for maximum productivity. I was excited and tingling all over, and I felt nothing. I kept sitting there, surely it was just a matter of time. Over the following days I worked through routine tasks, the kind I could have done on a train. And I kept waiting. And nothing came.

I felt neither creativity nor was I productive in any way. No flow appeared. I looked around my beautiful office and felt like a person who doesn’t function in it, and I had no clue why. I simply didn’t understand. The room was obviously perfect. Everything made sense. And yet it didn’t work at all.

So I moved out. Into the family kitchen. Okay, that only worked at certain times. I took my laptop into the basement, which for some reason felt somehow better. But the place I liked most was a café in the next village. A loud, restless place, small tables, conversations around me. I found my regular spot in a corner with a view of the street. It was loud, annoying, the opposite of what I had imagined for my inspiration. But there I could work creatively. That’s where the ideas came. Somehow I found the calm I needed right in the middle of the bustle.

That made no sense at all.

It took a while until I understood what had happened. I’m someone who needs silence but wants people around. Not for talking, just for being there. I want to watch life without anyone wanting anything from me. I want to see movement, faces, streets, without anyone speaking to me. That’s my way. And I only discovered it now. Outside my dream office.

I had built my dream office for a person I wasn’t. I had used Pinterest images as a template and from that I had developed an idea of myself that only existed in my head, not in reality. I sensed I needed calm, above all silence. Then I thought I lacked concentration, so I needed isolation. Neither was right, and it turned out to be fundamentally wrong.

This isn’t a small thing. I had planned a lot of the house myself. I knew myself well. And I knew exactly what I wanted. And I was completely off. Not about the colour of the walls or the desk model, but about the basic assumption of what kind of person I am and what I need to work.

If I don’t even know myself, how is an architect supposed to know me?

That’s the question that has preoccupied me since. Architects build spaces from briefs, budgets and their own taste. The client describes what they want, and the architect carries it out. I’ve been through this three times myself. Everyone works with assumptions. The client assumes he knows himself. The architect assumes the brief is correct. And neither of them is aware of how much vanity sits inside these assumptions. One of these architects at least tried to understand me. But what can he understand if I didn’t understand it myself?

Vanity is the right word. I built out of vanity. Not in the sense of showing off, but in the sense of a self-image that didn’t match reality. Architects also build out of vanity. Not all, not always, but the temptation is structurally built in. The profession rewards the image and not the effect, the design and not the experience of the person inside it.

Three houses, then, and three surprises. With every build the question should have grown louder: Why don’t we really try to understand who we’re building for? Not through questionnaires, not through experience-based assumptions, but through data, research, a systematic understanding of what a person needs in a space, even if they don’t know themselves. I had a different architect each time. Today I work with one of them on exactly this question. Not for my next house, but for other buildings and other people.

This led me to neuroscience. Not as a hobby, but as a new professional perspective. I advise US companies in increasingly chaotic markets, and I had built myself a system to read patterns from unstructured data. A kind of ontology with too much Excel and not much aesthetics. Then I began to apply the same method to spaces. To the question of why a café works and a dream office doesn’t.

What I found wasn’t an answer, but data, and mountains of it. Cognitive schemas, affective reactions, subliminal perception, environmental stimuli, all documented, but none of it brought together for practical use. The research existed, but it was as fragmented as the market data I had worked with before. Each study answered a partial question. None answered the larger whole, or even the slice of it that a particular building needs.

That’s where things stand, not yet as a solution but as a recognition that the question is a different one and much larger than any single discipline can answer. Neuroscience alone isn’t enough, and architecture alone certainly isn’t. A system is missing that connects the two. It exists as theory, but not as a tool for an architect, so that he can really understand the person he is building for. Because the person themselves usually knows too little about who they are and so can’t really understand what they actually want.