Nicole Baxter
the accidental theorist
It was a simple question that I couldn't find an answer to. I didn't mean to start a movement
In 2016 I completed a project for a couple transforming a dated home in Raleigh into something personal and made for entertaining. We threw a housewarming party so they could celebrate with all their friends, and I invited my business coach. She walked in, looked around with big eyes like everyone else, and said something that stopped me in my tracks: “Oh my gosh—I finally get what you do for a living! All this time I thought you helped people pick out furniture and paint color, but that’s not what you do at all. You create emotional experiences.”
Her words put language to something I’d long felt but couldn’t explain. The next morning, while making coffee, the phrase the Emotional Home came to me, quickly followed by the words, Design consciously, live beautifully. I didn’t know what it meant yet, but I knew I had to figure it out.
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"All this time I thought you helped people pick out furniture and paint color, but that’s not what you do at all. You create emotional experiences."
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I started researching everything I could find on the emotional and psychological effects of home—only to discover… nothing. A few odd articles here and there, but no meaningful answers. I compared my work to brands like RH and West Elm, who also create emotionally resonant visual systems. But why do those spaces feel so good? Where in the brain does that feeling come from?​
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My research led me to the limbic system—where we process pattern, memory, and emotion. I began to hypothesize that beauty isn’t a luxury. It’s essential and tied to survival. That cohesive, well-composed environments create peace because the brain thrives on pattern recognition. This insight raised even deeper questions: How much of our chronic anxiety is environmental? Could design help regulate the nervous system?
Psychologists didn’t want to talk about it. But in 2019, I found someone who did: Dr. Anjan Chatterjee at the Penn Center for Neuroaesthetics. I sent him my theory. He responded immediately—his lab was proving what I’d instinctively known and they called it 'neuroaesthetics'. He responded:
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"I think you are exactly correct. We conceptualize the space around us, which includes the architectural form as well as the design of interiors as tools to help humans flourish. In the same way one might wear warm clothes or wrap oneself with a blanket to feel warm, our built environment can be thought of as a wrap to meet our physical, cognitive, and emotional needs."
I was collaborating with Mike Peterson and Michelle Castagna on a panel series called Design Harmony, integrating my theory with their work on biophilia and color psychology, when Dr Chatterjee validated my theory. this took it from a well-informed hunch to 'oh wow-- i'm really onto something that could elevate and alter the course of our entire industy.' That October, we presented at High Point Market and caught the attention of Linda Kafka, an advocate for science-backed design education. We were invited to bring our work to Canada.
Then the pandemic hit—and everything changed.
While Mike repackaged and promoted my theory under the name Science in Design, I pushed forward in a different direction. I partnered with neuroscientist Dr. Hassan Aleem, whose research deepened my understanding of how the brain processes aesthetic preferences over time. Our collaboration helped me bridge the gap between intuition and neuroscience, and confirmed that beauty, memory, and emotional regulation are fundamentally linked.
That connection—to memory—brought me home. I began exploring how early emotional experiences shape our perception of space, how safe we feel, what elements remind us of negative experiences, and how our homes hold the psychological imprints of family dynamics. It became clear: home is not just a place. It’s an emotional ecosystem shaped by our brain, our history, and our relationships. In a very real way, designers are as critical to our mental wellbeing as therapists and psychologists-- while they address interpersonal relationships, we control the environmental information our brain receives.
What started as a hunch about beauty became a framework for understanding how our environments support—or sabotage—our nervous systems.
Did I start a movement? Who knows-- maybe it was synchronicity. What I do know is that the lack of information and my own curiosity lead me to a very interesting place.
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