Design Psychology

When someone calls and asks you to “landscape my home,” what does it mean?

Are you going over to put plants and trees in the ground, or will you be rolling in with backhoes to install a pond? This initial uncertainty is why, before any project begins in earnest, there are questions to be asked. It’s also why there are measurements to be taken, elevations to be shot, sketches and more sketches to be drawn, meetings to schedule and plans to present.

Then, maybe, a working design will develop and then, maybe, construction will start.

Gathering information and doing the foundation work on a design takes research, patience, experience and time, and it’s never something we, as designers, should take lightly. Just the same, many of us walk into clients’ homes with preconceptions and a sense that we know what’s best.

But imagine laboring for hours at the drafting table and creating a stunning design for your clients only to hear, “We don’t like it.” For whatever reason, whether they can express it or not, it’s something they don’t want: It doesn’t feel right to them. Other times, they may not know why they love the design, they just feel it.

DETECTIVE WORK

This feeling is the most important response we can draw out of our clients. If we get them to “feel” the design and be subconsciously drawn to the concept we’re presenting, then we’ve touched them where it counts – in their hearts and souls.

But we need to understand how to get to this place. We need, in other words, to be psychologists, detectives, spies and counselors who can delve into their psyches and explore what I call the “psychology of design.”

A pathway or entry, for instance, might functionally do no more than move people from point A to point B, but could, if planned correctly, also enhance their moods as they traverse the space. To achieve this greater effect, many of us routinely incorporate fragrant plants into our landscapes either because they smell good or because we’ve been taught to do so. But often we fail to consider what memories those smells might stimulate and what they might mean to our clients.

Getting to the core of such responses is seldom easy, but working toward that level of insight is truly part of what we should do. Listening to clients’ words, observing their body language and examining their lifestyles may reveal significant, even crucial clues about what they hope to achieve with their landscapes. Getting inside their heads, whether they’re aware of what we’re doing or not, will help us create landscapes that will touch them subconsciously and emotionally.

Yes, we are designers, not psychologists, so the process of gaining enlightenment can be tricky. By keeping in mind a few commonsense questions and observations while interviewing clients – and then employing them while creating designs – we can take these people in directions they didn’t know existed.

In my practice, we start by doing a quick on-the-phone assessment of their desires. If we get the impression we can help them, we get basic business out of the way quickly, letting them know our design-fee structure and meeting-scheduling process. Once we have a commitment for the initial meeting, we immediately send them a follow-up letter and a questionnaire.

This questionnaire is a four-page information-gathering device filled with questions that ask the basics: what their favorite colors are, how they think they’ll use the spaces and what design styles and architecture they like. The questionnaire also includes one of our best emotion indicators: “What are your favorite childhood memories?” The response to this question may drive much of what we will create – a powerful tool indeed.

POINTED DISCUSSIONS

Our first meeting with the clients is at their home – for obvious reasons, as what we’re after is a good look at their lifestyle. We search for clues: Books lying all over the place might indicate, for example, a need for a small terrace or a hammock or a reading nook. Plentiful cookbooks in the kitchen and a well-used barbecue might signal a need for a grill terrace and outdoor kitchen. Children’s toys in disarray could indicate a fundamental desire for storage areas near the deck or behind the garage.

But, of course, we never assume anything. These are just starting places, as are questions on the sheet such as:

[ ] Do you entertain?

[ ] Do you like to garden?

[ ] Do you need a place for kids to play?

[ ] What plants do you like or dislike?

[ ] Do you like formal or informal designs?

In addition to the questionnaire, we ask many more questions once we get together in person. One of my favorites is: “When you were ten years old and were playing hide-and-seek and fell down into a shrub or hedge, what was that plant?” For me it was Privet, and you’d be amazed at what I’ve heard from my clients through the years.

The question isn’t silly at all: What if you designed a beautiful climbing-rose/post-and-rail-fence detail on the property line of a clients’ home and never knew that, as a child, the wife had fallen into a hedgerow of roses and been traumatized by the experience? She probably wouldn’t even know why your choice put a bad taste in her mouth during the presentation, but it will all be downhill from there.

The degree of detail you pursue is up to you, but doing your homework on some of these emotional associations will carry the process in the right direction.

MAKING IMPRESSIONS

Real-estate agents preach the benefits of curb appeal to prospective sellers because first impressions are the strongest. If a house looks great from the outside, prospective buyers will have more positive opinions of the rest of the home as they walk through and around it. By contrast, if the front is messy and unkempt, they will see only the negative.

This principle applies to our work, too. If we design something that has a feature that completely turns the clients off, it doesn’t matter what else we present: Their negative attitude may govern them from that moment forward.

I once had prospective clients who loved everything about a design, except that the husband rejected the Stella D’Oro Daylilies that I’d suggested for one border planting. I told him we could substitute another perennial, no problem. But then I asked about the source of his reaction, which may have been a tactical error on my part.

His response was, “I don’t know. I just don’t like them.” There could have been myriad reasons for his lack of fondness for these plants, but the fact remained that he just didn’t want them – and it’s always been my suspicion that his loathing for certain Daylilies is the reason we didn’t get the job.

Fragrance is another tricky area that merits exploration, basically because smells have a stronger capacity to bring back memories than any other sense. Remember when your mother used to bake pies or cakes when you were a kid? Now you walk into a bakery and smell the exact same scents and, like it or not, you’re instantly transported back in time to the kitchen of the home in which you grew up.

Keep this in mind when using fragrant plants. Smells will bring back our clients’ memories, good and bad. It can work in your favor, but a childhood bout with allergies or asthma will be remembered all too quickly when the client is exposed to the offending scent again.

Similarly, sitting outside in the rain may bring memories back for clients of sitting on the porch during a thunderstorm, watching the rain falling through the leaves and drinking in the odors wafting through the thick summer air – or of getting drenched and catching a cold. All of these deep-seated memories cut in multiple ways, and it’s up to us to ferret out which.

MEMORY SENSE

These same sorts of memory-feelings apply to other experiences as well – of colors, shapes and tastes, for instance.

When I was a child, we had a plum tree in our backyard that all the kids in the neighborhood used to pick clean for summertime “snowball” fights. Imagine receiving one of these missiles in the face, and then a designer asks you 20 years later, “How about a grove of plum trees?” Conversely, you may have wonderful memories of strolling through a friend’s apple orchard.

Other people may have been scared by certain gnarly trees when they were children, in which case a Harry Lauder’s Walking Stick or a Corkscrew Willow might not be a great choice. These clients may not even know why these things turn them off, but they do, and you have no choice but to work with that fact.

There are no options here. To my mind, understanding our clients’ personalities is critical to creating landscapes that suit their needs, so we ask them all of the questions we can think of to glean cues we need to create appropriate spaces for them.

To a certain extent, that involves jarring their memories: If they don’t immediately know why they feel the way they do, it’s our job to play detective and figure things out. In other words, there’s a lot more to designing landscapes for discerning clients than drawing circles and shapes on a piece of vellum.

Landscape professionals are not just designers. To do our jobs effectively, we need to play many different roles, do our homework and make our clients do their homework. In the end, gathering this information and responding to it effectively is the key to designing landscapes that not only will make you proud, but also will make your clients happy to have chosen you.

Bruce Zaretsky is president of Zaretsky & Associates, Inc. a landscape design/construction company in Rochester, N.Y. Nationally recognized for creative and inspiring residential landscapes, Bruce also works with healthcare facilities, nursing homes, hospitals and local municipalities in conceiving and installing healing and meditation gardens – and labyrinths, too. You can reach him at [email protected].