Welcome to the online press kit for Rachel Melvald

When Spaces Shape the Nervous System

Through NEURODESIGN, Dr. Rachel Melvald explores how the spaces we inhabit influence stress, connection, and emotional well-being.

Our environments don’t just reflect who we are. They actively shape how we feel, relate, and recover.

Dr. Rachel Melvald’s work lives at the intersection of psychotherapy, neuroscience, and design. She explores how the spaces we inhabit influence stress, connection, and emotional well-being. As a licensed psychotherapist and the founder of Psychitecture™, she brings clinical insight into the built environment, revealing how certain spaces can calm, others can agitate, and intentional design can support regulation, resilience, and healthier relationships.

“Design isn’t neutral. Our spaces are constantly shaping how safe, connected, and regulated we feel.” – Dr. Rachel Melvald

Yet most homes, workplaces, and shared environments are still created without considering the nervous system at all.

Through her proprietary approach, NEURODESIGN, Dr. Melvald reframes the built environment as an active participant in mental health. Rather than treating design as a purely aesthetic or functional exercise, her work draws on neuroscience, environmental psychology, and trauma-informed principles to help spaces support emotional regulation, reduce stress, and strengthen human connection.

In a post-pandemic world marked by burnout, loneliness, fractured relationships, and housing stress, Dr. Melvald’s work offers a timely shift. She helps people understand how design choices (often invisible and underestimated) can either intensify, overwhelm, or create environments that feel grounding, restorative, and humane.

Why Dr. Rachel Melvald’s Work Is Different

Dr. Melvald ’s work stands apart because it:

• Treats the built environment as a co-regulator of the nervous system, not just a backdrop for life.


• Integrates neuroscience, environmental psychology, and trauma-informed care into real-world design.


• Bridges clinical insight and architecture, translating therapy concepts into livable spaces.


• Addresses relationships, stress, and emotional well-being through spatial design — not talk therapy.


• Responds to post-pandemic realities where homes must support living, working, healing, and aging.


• Applies design thinking to homes, workplaces, real estate, and community spaces.

Dr. Melvald is the author of “NEURODESIGN: The Art and Science of Harmonious Living” (June 24, 2025), a book that reframes design as an often-overlooked influence on mental health, relational dynamics, and quality of life — especially as more people live, work, heal, and age in the same spaces. Her signature themes and keynote topics include:

• Designing for the nervous system: how space affects stress, mood, and regulation.


• When design becomes a therapeutic tool: trauma-informed, neuroscience-based environments.


• Designing spaces for disaster recovery: how the built environment can provide sensory cues that promote safety and stability for disaster survivors.


• The hidden mental health impact of our homes: anxiety, burnout, conflict, disconnection.


• Post-pandemic living: why our homes must now support living, working, healing, and aging.


• Aging-in-place design beyond checklists: dignity, identity, autonomy, joy.


• Real estate and buyer psychology: why people feel “yes” in one home and “no” in another.


• Trauma-informed design beyond clinical settings: homes, schools, senior housing, community spaces.

Download a one pager for Dr. Rachel Melvald.
Visit her website: Psychitecture.com