Wooden Indoor Environments’ Restorativeness

The sensitivity and interest toward well-being and health inside work and living environments is constantly growing. Wood is perceived as a natural material by people and its presence in a room generally induces beneficial effects on human beings. In this research, two real-sized identical wood and not-wood rooms have been built to study the psychological effects of a wooden indoor environment on attention recovery and restorativeness. After a multisensory evaluation of differ-ent kind of materials used in housing, participants were asked to evaluate the two rooms and then to perform an attention test two times, interspersed with a pause in one of the two rooms. The re-sults show that wood samples are more appreciated than all other materials and that a wood en-vironment induces an attentional resources’ recovery. These findings bring new insights in the in-teraction between human beings and indoor environments. This new knowledge should be taken into account in the design or renovation of buildings by architects and builders.