Top Therapist Office Design Tips

Therapist office design can affect your clients’ comfort level, engagement, and commitment to therapy. Therefore, your waiting room layout and office decor are important factors that contribute to clients’ overall experience.

For clients, walking into therapy can be intimidating. Consequently, it’s essential to prioritize calming therapist office decor for the waiting room and the other rooms in your office space. 

Many of us work inside our offices every day without taking a moment to look around with a critical eye, sit on our couches, and consider all aspects of our own therapy office design through the eyes of a client.

An Exercise to Evaluate Your Therapist Office Design 

Step one: When you have some free time between sessions, take a few minutes to go outside your office.

Then, enter through the public entrance. Take a seat on the chair in your waiting room, and look around.

Next, go into your office and settle in where your clients typically sit during a session.

Consider these questions about your therapist office decor:

• Does your environment and therapist office design reflect the energy you want it to?
  
• Is your office dusty?
  
• How do the photos, art, and wall hangings look?
  
• Is the paint on the walls of your therapy office or waiting room dingy, scuffed, or chipped?
• Are the magazines appropriate?
  
• How does your office smell?Clients pick up on a lot of signals from our therapist office decor.

For example, they may notice the dead flower in the vase on your desk, or they may wonder why a candy wrapper has been under your chair for the past three months

Step two: Invite a trusted friend or fellow therapist in to assess your therapist office design and bring a fresh pair of eyes to your waiting room and office.

Let them know you’d like them to provide honest feedback on the questions listed above. Ask them to share any other details they noticed or experienced while critically evaluating your space.

Spending time in a room that reflects the soothing, positive energy that your clients are seeking to cultivate can boost the quality of your sessions together—and keep them coming back.

5 Keys to Modern Therapist Office Decor

Good news: Many therapist office decorating ideas have wide appeal and high-impact for your clients at a fairly low cost. You don’t need to go over-the-top and spend a lot of money.

An essential point is ensuring your therapist office design is inclusive for all of your clients.

When you’re considering therapist office decorating ideas, make sure that everything is in sync and represents you and your authentic personality and brand. 
With that in mind, here are five tips for therapist office design.

1. Keep Everything Clean and Tidy

If there are stains on your couch cushions, a disheveled bathroom, noticeable trash, or a cluttered desk, you’re not setting yourself up for success.

Make sure that your entire office—from the waiting room and private rooms to the hallways and bathroom—is all clean and stain-free. 

Swapping out pillow covers or adding a throw blanket to your couch can help with any permanent stains that you can’t get rid off right now.

If your desk is overflowing with papers, consider getting simple organizers to help keep your items together.

When it comes to small therapy office design, organization is important to help ensure your clients feel calm and safe.

2. Choose a Calming Color Palette

The best color for therapy offices are generally lighter, not too distracting, and lending a fresh feel to the room. 

Neutrals, pale blues and greens reminiscent of nature are always great options. For example, you might consider Behr paint’s 2022 color of the year—Breezeway, which is a tranquil, soothing, pale green hue.

Pro painting tip: Be sure to keep a small container of the paint color somewhere so that you can do easy touch ups whenever your walls may get a scuff.

3. Invest in Plants

Plants can be a game changer for helping to create a relaxed environment for your sessions.

However, if you’re going to invest in plants to decorate your therapy office, make sure you keep them alive. 

Your clients are coming to you to feel energized, and living plants can help feed and nurture that energetic feeling.

Plants with dry or dead leaves, on the other hand, can do exactly the opposite, so be sure to maintain and care for your plants.

If you’re fortunate enough to have natural sunlight, a large plant like a rubber tree or fiddle leaf fig are great options that represent growth.

If you don’t have ideal sunlight, there are many plants that are low maintenance and thrive in darker spaces. For instance, succulents and snake plants are inexpensive and resilient.

4. Keep Art Minimalist

When a client comes to therapy, the last thing they need is a distraction from being able to concentrate on the discussion during their session. 
Therapist office art is a reflection of your personality, so make sure any wall hangings, photos, or paintings give off a relaxed and enjoyable energy.

If you’re looking for framed art, landscapes are generally good subjects to consider.

Landscapes are normally simple in calming color palettes, and a nice thing to look at if your client needs a “mini mental break.”

You can also look into including decorative objects on floating wall shelves. Just be mindful to ensure that it doesn’t look cluttered.

5. Don’t Forget Sense of Smell

Therapist office design goes beyond how your space presents visually. 

Your clients will also notice how your office smells.

Because scent is such a strong sense, and because preferences vary for everyone, the most critical element is ensuring that your space is fresh.

This means that you might want to eat lunch in a different room, especially if your lunch has a strong scent (not everyone likes tuna fish, garlic, or cooked meat). 

You should also keep an air freshener in your office bathroom at all times. 

If you want to consider candles, the most common scents that promote relaxation are lavender, eucalyptus, rose, geranium, and bergamot. 

Remember, everyone has different scent preferences. Consequently, it’s a good idea to ask each client if they want a candle lit beforehand.

After you consider and spruce up your therapy office design, your space will feel more pulled together.

Best of all, you’ll feel more confident and focused in your office, and your clients will feel more at ease when they come to work with you.

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