Those questions tie in with Chatterjee’s work, which has found that when people see a space that they describe as being beautiful, the experience triggers in the parts of the brain that scientists associate with our body’s internal reward systems — the same as what happens when we get pleasurable food or good sex.

Graham also thought there might be similarities between how people want spaces to make them feel, even if they have different ideas of what makes that space cozy. Her team has worked on studies that tried to figure out what emotional expectations people have for different rooms of the house. Their samples were from North America, but they found a lot of consistency here, she said, with respondents generally wanting one of two things from a bedroom: Restful comfort or romantic intimacy. This might seem obvious, she told me, but from an architect’s point of view, it can be beneficial to understand how clients want their rooms to feel — because that framework can guide discussions and ensure that clients are happier, for longer, in the spaces that have been designed for them.

Beyond the practical, though, there’s reason to be interested in the science of subjective aesthetics just because it’s really, really weird.