Media from around the world describe how the Truehome approach applies psychology and brain science to creating homes that fit their inhabitants.
The New York Times
Truehome’s founder and his approach to creating the “experience of home” have been covered by The New York Times.
Worried that buying, remodeling, or designing and building a new living space will cause issues in your relationship? Times reporter David Colman says your fears are justified in “Marital Issues Buried in the Sofa.”
Published on the cover of the Home section, this major article brought international attention to Truehome and its approach to designing living spaces that matches the emotional architecture of their inhabitants.
For two days, it was one of the most emailed articles in the Times and was reprinted in major dailies all over the U.S. and Europe.
Writer Penelope Green interviewed a number of Travis’ clients who were living in homes designed using the Truehome Workshop. It was this article that dubbed Truehome the “eHarmony®.com of homes.”
Gizmodo
“Exclusive: The Plans for Steve Jobs New House,”
Author Bryan Gardiner asked Truehome CEO Chris Travis to comment on Jobs’ house plans. Travis commented on the strict adherence to simplicity. “The natural tendency is to go ‘McMansion.’ I would say this plan is a direct result of a specific requirement by Jobs to make it plain and simple…It’s almost Zen, with a vaguely oriental simplicity to it.”
Sally Augustin, an environmental psychologist and advisor to Truehome, added, “I would say Steve Jobs and his family are quite comfortable in their own skins and not out to prove anything to anyone,” she said. “They have assessed what they need in a home, and will have it built.”
Go Magazine
“Home is Where the Heart Is: Use Emotional Design to Create Your Dream Home,”
Truehome and Christopher K. Travis were flying high with a story in Go Magazine, AirTran Airways’ in-flight magazine. Here’s a quote from that article, viewed by many of AirTran’s two million passengers a month:
“Are architects and designers really supposed to care about their clients’ mental health and well-being when building or decorating their homes? The answer: a resounding ‘yes.’
When Christopher K. Travis, managing partner of Texas-based Sentient Architecture, begins to design a client’s home, the first thing he considers is their “emotional architecture”—the internal system of feelings built by past experiences that make them react to their surroundings in a certain way.
‘How we feel in [childhood homes] during formative events — good and bad — returns in later homes when features within them remind us of those early experiences,’ Travis says.”
Austin Monthly
“Psychology Meets Architecture,”
In this article, our home town magazine discusses the Truehome Workshop, the original workbook used by Travis and his architecture firm, available in PDF form on this website.
“Local award-winning home designer/builder Chris Travis [developed] a process that combined psychological testing with architectural programming to help his clients better identify what they were really looking for in a home. The process, called the Truehome Workshop, uses various techniques to determine the client‘s lifestyle, budget restrictions, relationship patterns and emotional responses to environmental features.”
Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You
Sam Gosling, Ph.D.
Dr. Sam Gosling is the winner of the 2008 American Psychological Association’s Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology. He is an international expert on personality and its relationship to human environments.
Snoop was his first book for popular audiences and was highly successful. It was chosen as one of the Top Science Books of 2008 by New Scientist magazine.
Dr. Gosling first met Christopher K. Travis while writing Snoop, and was so impressed after interviewing Travis’ clients, he focused much of his last chapter on Travis and Truehome. Gosling credits Travis with teaching him “how the unique needs we seek to satisfy with our physical spaces are rooted deeply in our past experiences.”
Dr. Gosling has been featured on ABC’s Nightline and interviewed for USA Today and Psychology Today. He was profiled by The New York Times and featured in Malcolm Gladwell’s best-selling book Blink.
A year after the book was published, Dr. Gosling not only endorsed the approach, but became an advisor and investor in Truehome.
Homme Design and Architecture, No. 62
Each year, the large Athens daily Imerisia dedicates an issue of their magazine, Homme, to architecture.
Christopher K. Travis was included among other “trend makers” in the field of architecture because of his unique approach, which puts the feelings of people ahead of design concepts in the mind of the architect.
Sydney Morning Herald
“Home is Where the Psyche Is,”
Christopher K. Travis was included among a handful of experts featured in an article in the Sydney Morning Herald. The article explored the emotional attachment people have to their homes and how experts are beginning to acknowledge the powerful connection that memories and associations have to decisions about home.
Suddeutsche Zeitung Magazine
“Too Nice to Be Close To: A Great Love Broken,”
A sad and sensitive tale of lost love that results from pursuing a perfect home, rather than a better relationship, featuring Travis and Truehome.
“…Houses talk to us,” believes the philosopher Alain de Botton. “Why do not we hear them?” People think too much about style, he writes in the book The Architecture of Happiness, “rather than the question of who we want to be.”
World of Wonder
“The Secret Code of Human Knowledge,”
Travis joined Dr. Sam Gosling and eminent British psychologist Richard Wiseman in an in-depth article called “The Secret Code of Human Knowledge” in the popular science magazine, Welt der Wunder (World of Wonder).