My Dream Office Was a Lie

I’ve built three houses. For the second one, I designed my dream office. Big desk, good furniture, view from the window. Everything exactly as I wanted it. I sat down and waited for the ideas.

They didn’t come.

For two years, I sat in that room and produced nothing. No creativity, no productivity, no flow. Just a beautiful office and a person who didn’t function in it. I didn’t understand. The room was perfect. Everything was right. And yet everything was wrong.

Then I started going elsewhere. To the family kitchen. To a café in the next town. A loud, restless place, small tables, conversations all around me. I found my regular spot in a corner with a view of the street. It was noisy, annoying, the opposite of what I had wished for. And that’s where I could work. That’s where the ideas came. That’s where I found calm.

It made no sense.

It took years before I understood what had happened. I’m someone who needs quiet but wants people around. Not to talk to. Just to be there. I want to watch life without it demanding anything of me. I want to see movement, faces, streets, without anyone addressing me. That’s how I’m wired. And I didn’t know it.

I had built my dream office for a person I wasn’t. For an idea of myself that existed in my head but not in reality. I thought: I need calm, so I need silence. I thought: I need focus, so I need isolation. Both were wrong. Fundamentally wrong.

This isn’t a small thing. I had planned the house myself. I knew myself. I knew what I wanted. And I was completely off. Not about the color of the walls or the height of the desk. 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 stayed with me since. Architects build spaces based on briefs, budgets, and their own taste. The client describes what they want, and the architect delivers it. Both work with assumptions. The client assumes they know themselves. The architect assumes the brief is accurate. And neither is aware of how much vanity is embedded in those assumptions.

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. And architects build out of vanity. Not all of them, not always, but the temptation is structural. The profession rewards the image, not the effect. The design, not the experience of the person inside it.

Three houses, three surprises. With each build, the question got louder: Why don’t we actually try to understand who we’re building for? Not through questionnaires. Not through assumptions. But through data, research, a systematic understanding of what a person needs in a space, even when they don’t know it themselves.

That’s what led me to neuroscience. Not as a hobby, but as a necessity. I was advising US companies in chaotic markets and had built a system to read patterns from unstructured data. A kind of ontology, lots of spreadsheets, little elegance. Then I started applying 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. It was data. Mountains of it. Cognitive schemas, affective responses, subliminal perception, environmental stimuli. All documented, nothing connected. The research existed, but it was as fragmented as the market data I had worked with before. Every study answered a partial question. None answered mine.

That’s where things stand. Not the solution, but the realization that the question is bigger than any single discipline can answer. Neuroscience alone isn’t enough. Architecture alone even less so. What’s missing is a system that connects both. Not as theory. As a tool that helps an architect understand the person they’re building for. Even when that person doesn’t know themselves.