An essay
Why a round space
feels like home
There is a reason almost every traditional dwelling, across cultures that never met, arrived at the same shape. The round structure is older than the rectangle, and something in us still recognises it.
A circle has no corners for the wind to catch, no weak walls, no wasted material. It encloses the most space with the least structure. Engineers call this efficiency. Sitting inside one, you call it something else: a quiet sense of being held.
That feeling turns out to be more than poetry. Environmental psychologists have spent years asking how the shapes around us affect how we feel, and curves come up again and again. Studies suggest the brain reads curved forms as softer and safer than sharp angles, easing the subtle threat-response that corners and edges quietly provoke. People linger longer in rounded rooms. They relax more readily. The likeliest explanation is old: for most of human history, a smooth curve in the landscape meant less danger than a jagged edge.
The research is honest enough to be interesting rather than tidy. In one virtual-reality study most people felt better in rooms with curved edges than in sharp rectangular ones - though, tellingly, the design students in the group preferred the opposite. Taste and training pull against instinct. But the instinct is there, and a yurt speaks to it directly: there is not a single corner in the whole structure to hold tension.
I built my first round structure in 2009. I had no intention of starting anything. But one yurt led to another, and over the years it became a small craft - canvas and steam-bent wood, lattice walls that fold flat and rise again, a crown wheel open to the sky.
I have built yurts to live in and yurts to gather in. One was made as a space for birth - a soft, round room for the beginning of a life. Another became a meditation room, another a writing studio, another simply a warm place to be with friends. Each one is different, because each person and each piece of land asks for something different.
By profession I am a psychologist - I spend my working life helping people find more space and ease within themselves. Perhaps that is why the round space speaks to me. It does the same thing in wood and canvas that good inner work does in a person: it removes the corners, the tension, the wasted effort, and leaves something calm and whole. Building them was never really a business. It was, and still is, an outgrown hobby that I have never quite been able to put down.