Why We Want a House With a Great View

by Mitchell Parker A $1 million view. That’s an interesting thing when you really think about it. For someone to fork over a cool million just for the opportunity to wake up to a certain landscape every day says a great deal not only about what that view might entail, but about what humans desire. A space could be small and void of character, but if it has windows that frame rolling hills or water, the value of that space skyrockets. Why?  In 1984, Roger Ulrich, now a professor of architecture at the Center for Healthcare Building Research at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, published an article in the journalScience that found a correlation between the speed of recovery of patients in a suburban Pennsylvania hospital with a view of nature compared with patients with a view of a brick wall. He showed that patients with the better view recovered more quickly, had fewer negative comments about nurses and took fewer potent analgesics than those with the brick wall view.  Psychology professors Stephen and Rachel Kaplan at the University of Michigan would go on to pioneer research that shows how environments can have restorative properties. Basically, when people look at nature, it helps restock mental energy.  (more…)