Cassandra York has spent nearly two decades refining a philosophy she calls Design Alchemy. While many may recognise her as an industry accredited, therefore qualified, Interior Designer and Architectural Draftsperson her work has long since moved beyond the standard details of Interiors and Architecture. Her latest focus—Design Neuro Architecture—is transforming how we think about the built environment and its effect on health, behaviour, and even crime prevention.
Neuroarchitecture is a relatively new field of scientific enquiry, only formally recognized in the last ten years. But Cassandra has been quietly studying the science behind it for much longer. Her aim is to understand how architecture and design influence the nervous system, emotions, and overall well-being. The built environment, as she defines it, encompasses everything humans create—from interior rooms and renovated homes to community spaces and landscaped environments. Every structure has the potential to either support or compromise a person’s psychological and physical state.
Central to her approach is a deep reverence for nature. That connection has been present since childhood, when she first began observing both human and natural behavior. Personal adversity—including complex trauma experienced in childhood, adolescence and earlier adulthood—fuelled her commitment to understanding not only herself but the mechanisms behind human suffering and resilience.
Over the past fifteen years, alongside her design work, Cassandra has pursued rigorous study in neuroscience, psychology, psychiatry, and psycho neuro immunology. She’s particularly focused on the central nervous system and how its regulation, or dysregulation, underpins both chronic illness and mental health struggles. Her aim is to bring that scientific insight into the spaces people inhabit every day, designing environments that promote safety, calm, and healing.
The concept is especially meaningful for individuals living with trauma or emotional dysregulation. Cassandra knows this experience firsthand. For over thirty years, she lived with repressed memories, experiencing an internal sense that something wasn’t right but unable to articulate why. Like many, she internalized emotional struggles to avoid adversely affecting those around her. Eventually, the cost of that silence became impossible to ignore. It was then that her work in design began to evolve into something more purposeful and deeply personal.
Today, she creates environments that support nervous system recovery. These are spaces designed to reduce sensory overwhelm, encourage emotional regulation, and support the subtle needs of people navigating trauma or adversity. The work begins with trust—and Cassandra knows that trust is built not through expertise alone, but through authenticity, vulnerability, and instinct.
She describes intuition as a fundamental design tool, backed increasingly by science. Energy, she says, is the basis of all existence. It’s felt between people, within spaces, and across time. The more she learns—through neuroscience, epigenetics, and even quantum physics—the more she recognizes the legitimacy of what was once dismissed as “gut feeling.” Instinct, she explains, is a whole-body experience rooted in the central nervous system and shaped by endocrinology, hormones, and even our genetic wiring for spirituality.
Color, too, plays a crucial role. Cassandra possesses a mastery of color theory that extends far beyond palette selection. From a young age, she developed the ability to mix and match hues with precision, understanding not just their visual appeal but their physiological and psychological effects. The right color, in the right space, can soothe anxiety, encourage focus, or uplift a depleted mood. It’s one of many tools she uses to influence how a space is experienced at the most primal level.
Her passion for learning remains relentless. She is currently collaborating with a medical doctor to collect empirical data on how designed spaces affect human biology. Their goal is to create environments that offer measurable benefits, supporting not just mental health but also physical health outcomes. Cassandra sees this as part of a broader cultural shift—especially since COVID—towards further prevention in medicine and leveraged design. The pandemic, she believes, gave people outside academia access to new research avenues, and she’s built an extensive library of peer-reviewed material over the past decade.
Underpinning all of this is a belief that healing begins with environment. Cassandra points out that inflammation is a primary driver of chronic disease, and that dysregulation of the nervous system is often the source. While the science may be complex, the principle is simple: spaces can support healing, or they can hinder it. She chooses to design for healing.
The conversation extends to the scientific enquiry of using design to mitigate crime. Citing evidence from prison environments and institutional settings, she suggests that the right space can influence behavior at a foundational level. This area of research, she says, is still emerging, but the implications are profound.
Cassandra has never considered herself a victim, even after acknowledging the trauma she endured. That mindset—one of curiosity, gratitude, and determination—has shaped her both personally and professionally. As a child, she watched adults struggle with stress and sadness and made herself a promise: I must never lose my sense of wonder. That promise remains her guiding principle.
There’s much more she plans to explore—how spaces influence behavior, how design can intersect with criminology, and how environments can become allies in recovery. Her work is ongoing, her curiosity insatiable. And at the center of it all is a belief that design, when done with intention and insight, has the power to change lives.