For 22 years Joanne and Daniel Megna lived in monochromatic splendor on Staten Island. "Everything was beige," said Joanne Megna, who was reluctant to change the decor by Ruben de Saavedra, who was one of Manhattan's chicest decorators in the 1980s. "It was very elegant and very quiet."
When the couple recently decided to renovate and refurbish, they hired Dennis Rolland, another Manhattan designer, because they admired the work he had done for their friends. But Rolland's reputation for using intense colors made Joanne Megna nervous. "There were many sleepless nights," she said.
She eventually put her fears aside and agreed, along with her husband, to banana yellow striped walls in the foyer, coral walls and draperies in the living room, turquoise chairs in the dining room and winter sky blue walls in the bedroom.
"It's something you have to get used to," Joanne Megna said. But, she added: "As Dennis guided us toward more color, a new world opened up to us. This is very joyful. It's a happy house. It makes me personally feel more alive."
In the last decade the social sciences have become increasingly focused on happiness and what accounts for it, and over the past several months the rest of the culture has been catching up. The best-attended course at Harvard last semester was Positive Psych, an introduction to a new field of psychology that eschews the traditional approach of focusing on pathologies in favor of studying the sources of happiness -- "a class whose content resembles that of many a self-help book," as the Boston Globe reported. Last month New York magazine published a cover story on the amount of interest in the subject, citing a spate of new books, the six-year-old Journal of Happiness Studies and courses at more than 100 colleges, all of which address the question of what makes people happy.
And in the fall The Architecture of Happiness, by the philosopher Alain de Botton, who lives in England, will be published in the US. In it he argues that physical environment is a crucial contributor to well-being. Like it or not, he suggests, the spaces we live in shape our sense of happiness and of self, so we had better choose them carefully.
Even before this vogue took hold in America, however, a number of influential East Coast decorators were exploring the same issues, and advancing a theory of their own: that a maximalist, color-saturated approach to interiors is a secret to happiness -- maybe even the secret.
"Your home should be like a good dose of Zoloft," Jonathan Adler, the ceramist and decorator, and one of the most prominent members of this group, wrote in his 2005 book, My Prescription for Anti-Depressive Liing.
But whether the unrelentingly cheery interiors Adler and his colleagues create always have that kind of uplifting effect -- or are more likely to drive people crazy -- is a matter of some debate. What is clear is that the new school of happiness decor is producing interiors that evoke strong responses in everyone who spends time in them.
These designers are not the first to try cultivating happiness; many, in fact, trace their mission to the influence of the mid-century decorator Dorothy Draper, who wrote the 1939 book <> Draper, currently the subject of a major exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York, studied with the Norman Vincent Peale, the author of the 1952 book <>. She saw herself as an evangelist, charged with spreading the word that "lovely clear colors have a vital effect on our mental happiness."
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