“Coziness” is experiential, a function of lived-reality. “Cosi-ness,” (my contribution to the language this lovely Sunday morning, with apologies to Mozart fans) would be “so-ness,” and not be experiential, but prescriptive, an a priori judgment based on characteristics. As in, “It is this, so it is that”; “It is small, so it is cozy.”

These two do not necessarily map perfectly, however, as Pasanella notes:

When a room gets too giant, it loses its connection with its inhabitants. The goal is to make it at once intimate and grand. One of my favorite examples is the Linonia and Brothers in Unity Reading Room at Yale. With its ornate plaster ceiling and massive stone fireplace, the two-story room is awesome, until you sink into one of the dozens of leather club chairs parked in its alcoves. The L&B, as students call it, is a monster space that lulls. [emphasis added]

But, while it is possible to create a “monster space that lulls,” it takes a masterful grasp of the dynamics of space and lived-experience to do so. In that regard, I highly recommend Christopher Alexander’s wonderful book, A Pattern Language in which these matters are described masterfully. (I would have made the title a link, but Moveable Type considers the contiguous usage of the letters h-t-t-p to be pornographic.)

I believe the challenge for us will be creating human-scale spaces (feeding our need for intimacy, protection and coziness) in oversized homes (feeding our needs for power, self-aggrandizement and immortality).

Hence, interior designers and decorators become the true psychoanalysts, or better, “spacoanalysts,” of the future, enabling us to resolve these conflicts, in ways that still permit us to buy great furniture!