Why a traditional home??

Walk into most new housing developments and you'll hit a mental brick wall. Rectangular rooms. Flat walls. Uniform materials. Your brain enters what I call the "stop sign" effect. There's nowhere for your mind to wander. No details to draw your eye. No texture that invites your touch. You're standing in a psychological dead end, and we're building thousands of them every year backed by our government. They are lack lustre and lifeless.

Having spent years working with traditional buildings, I've discovered something most people miss entirely. The crisis isn't just about housing shortages or historical preservation.

We're creating a mental health emergency, one box at a time.

The Journey Your Brain Never Takes

Step into a traditional building and something different happens. Your eye catches an interesting fireplace. Follows the curve of hand-carved skirting boards. Traces the uneven line where lime plaster meets oak beams. Your brain goes on what I call a "journey of feeling." Most modern construction offers no such journey. Walk into a new build and you're halted. The rectangular uniformity creates mental boundaries that mirror the physical ones.

But here's what's fascinating about traditional materials, take a thatched roof made from straw that grew in nearby fields and your mind traces that connection back to its source. There's a link from earth to final destination that man-made materials simply cannot provide. The correlation between building materials and mental wellbeing runs deeper than most people realize. It's about our fundamental connection to the earth through the spaces we inhabit daily.

This isn't nostalgia. It's neuroscience. Research shows that wood produces higher alpha wave activity, indicating deeper relaxation. During mentally demanding tasks, people exposed to wood show increased beta wave activity, pointing to enhanced focus. Traditional materials literally change how your brain functions.

The Meditation Hidden In Restoration

People think meditation requires stillness and silence, but I think differently, from working with lime plaster and traditional materials, restorative work is meditation in motion. For example when you're mixing lime plaster, you work by feel rather than exact measurements. Like cooking a familiar meal, you add what feels right for this particular wall, this specific building.No two craftspeople will ever approach the same building identically, each structure tells you what it needs if you listen with your senses. The process demands presence, patience and a deep attention to texture, moisture, temperature. You're led by sensory input rather than mechanical repetition.

This is mindfulness without the meditation cushion.

Traditional building materials like lime plaster create healthier environments by allowing buildings to breathe, reducing trapped moisture and stabilising humidity. But they do something more profound. They ground you in physical reality through tactile engagement that synthetic materials cannot replicate.

What We Lose When Buildings Just Exist

Traditional buildings live and breathe. Modern boxes just exist! The difference shapes how we think and feel every day, traditional spaces, engage your senses with natural light patterns, acoustic properties that emerge from thick walls and irregular surfaces, spatial arrangements that evolved over centuries of human habitation.Modern construction offers none of this sensory richness in the same way it is more surface level, it lacks dimension. We're becoming robotic in spaces designed for efficiency rather than human flourishing. Even our homes reflect this mechanisation.

Children understand this intuitively. Take a child to visit a castle and watch them explore the dungeon, climb to the roof, run their hands along stone walls. They learn through their senses in ways no textbook can teach. These sensory lessons create deeper understanding than surface-level academic knowledge. But we're systematically removing these learning environments from our communities. Research confirms that design elements directly affect mental health, with patients adjusting better to small-scale, home-like facilities with lower stimulation levels. We're designing the opposite!

The Custodian Mindset

People who live in traditional buildings understand something others miss, they see themselves as custodians rather than mere owners. they know these structures require ongoing attention, they accept the building as an ever-evolving entity that needs care, patience, and understanding. The relationship with the building changes how they inhabit the space. They’re not just consuming shelter, they're participating in a living system that connects them to generations of previous inhabitants and the earth itself. Modern construction discourages this relationship. New builds are designed for passive consumption rather than active engagement. Where buildings require no understanding, offer no sensory engagement, and demand no custodianship, we lose more than architectural character. We lose our connection to the physical world that grounds us psychologically.

The Radical Solution

My most controversial recommendation would make planners think I've lost my mind. But here it is.

Restore existing properties first. Use natural materials for everything new. Stop building synthetic versions of natural products wherever possible that damage rather than heal. Stop throwing up boxes without thought for the psychological consequences our children will inherit. We're in serious danger of losing character within our building stock. Once it's gone, it's gone forever!

The cost argument misses the point. We're already paying the price in mental health, community disconnection, and environmental degradation.

We need to become a noisy minority of people who refuse to accept boxes as homes.