A wellness home
does not begin with a SPA.
It begins with land, light, quiet and human proportion.

Right proportions

A home cut to the height of the husband and wife. Not to a building-code table.

External dimensions follow your height through the golden ratio Φ. Interior rooms are scaled to the wife's height. Window sizes, door heights and pier widths are multiples of sazhens — Russian harmonic measures, calibrated to your family.

Step inside, and the body recognises it: the windowsill meets your hand, the ceiling sits above your eyes, the doorway accepts your shoulder. A home built by standard meters needs renovating after five years («something feels off»). A home calculated to your body never needs renovating.

The method was used by Vitruvius, Palladio, Leonardo's Vitruvian Man, Le Corbusier's Modulor. Two thousand years of architectural practice — against one century of normative meters.

Right orientation

The main entrance and the bedroom windows face the sunrise.

The first thirty minutes of morning sunlight set the family's circadian rhythm for the day. With the right orientation: deep sleep, clear morning, calm children. Without it: slow wake-up, rising cortisol by evening, and within a year the household accepts this state as normal.

A house where the sun wakes you first makes alarm clocks unnecessary. Awakening through light is gentler. The body recovers fully. Mornings don't get broken by sharp sounds and the first cup of coffee.

This is neurobiology, studied at Harvard, Berkeley and European sleep centers: light, sleep and recovery work through mechanisms every body shares.

Right placement

Every room in its proper place.

Kitchen and dining toward the east, to the morning sun. Bedroom toward the west, where the day ends in calm. Study to the northeast, where light gives clarity of thought. At the heart of the house — a quiet energy core: no engineering shafts, no flowing water, no heavy machinery.

Catalogue houses often place the kitchen next to the bedroom, the bathroom in the center, noisy plumbing risers near the children's room. Within a year, the family adapts to half-sleeping and quick eating. In a properly arranged home, every zone serves its function — and you feel it from day one.

Master architects observed this principle intuitively: piano nobile in Palladio, the central atrium of Roman villas, the «quiet center» in vedic architecture. We bring it back consciously.

The Western canon Φ

Ten Books of Vitruvius. Four Books of Palladio. Leonardo's Vitruvian Man. Le Corbusier's Modulor. A continuous canon from the 1st century BCE to the mid-20th century.

St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, Palladio's Basilica in Vicenza, the Unité d'Habitation in Marseille — each has stood for centuries and remains a benchmark, because it was built by laws that don't go out of date.

Vitruvius derives proportions from the diagonal of a square and the human body. Palladio develops a system of orders. Le Corbusier consolidates it into a single modular scale, the Modulor, in 1948. I draw on all three sources — every drawing is checked against Φ.

The Russian sazhen system

Twelve commensurate sazhens — city, great, Greek, royal, church, common — are not a random set of old units. They form a two-row modular system of the golden ratio, rigorously described by A. A. Piletsky and A. F. Chernyaev in the 20th century.

External dimensions follow the husband's height. Interior rooms follow the wife's. The home receives a chordal structure of proportions: the same laws that make a musical «C» align with «E» in a third. Waking in such a house, the body recognises the harmony of space before the mind notices it.

The major studies on sazhens — Chernyaev's Foundations of Russian Geometry, Golden Dimensions of Physics and Gold of Old Rus — comprise hundreds of pages of mathematical proof. I built my own house by this system.

Vastu Vidya

One of the most complete architectural systems that has reached us in a living tradition. It unites three levels — proportions, orientation by cardinal directions, and the placement of functions — into one method. The canonical texts are five classical shastras: Mayamatam, Manasara, Samarangana-sutradhara, Vishvakarma-vastushastra, Brihat-samhita.

Among my teachers is the Indian master Krishnan Nambudiripad in Kerala. Among the key texts we studied is Manushyalayachandrika, the classical South Indian treatise on proportions of a dwelling, preserved in an unbroken oral lineage.

I study the shastras themselves in English academic translations — the principal language in which Indian architectural thought develops outside India.

2,000 years of canon

The proportions of the human body and the golden ratio Φ are tested not in a laboratory but by thousands of buildings that have outlasted eras. The best proof of the architectural canon is buildings that, after 500 years, no one wants to demolish.

Le Corbusier built the Unité d'Habitation and the chapel at Ronchamp by his Modulor. Seventy years later — UNESCO benchmarks. Architectural fashion has changed six times in that period. The canon has not.

Circadian rhythms

The first thirty minutes of sunlight are the principal synchroniser of the human circadian rhythm. Sleep, cortisol, recovery and mood through the day all depend on it.

Houses oriented to sunrise give the family a steady circadian cycle. This isn't an add-on to coffee and vitamins — it's the very biological foundation on which every other health habit rests. The orientation cannot be fixed by renovation or furniture: it's set once, when the house is sited, and stays with the family for life.

Noise and cortisol

Constant background noise in zones of sleep and rest raises cortisol and impairs recovery — even when you've stopped consciously hearing it. The principle of the «quiet center» requires an unloaded, calm core: the heart of the home isn't filled with engineering shafts, water flows or noisy machinery.

This aligns with current WHO recommendations. A home in which you rest must be quiet at its heart, not just behind a closed bedroom door.