Sea Ranch, a planned community built on a sheep ranch in Sonoma County, Calif., in the late 1960s, has become known as a modernist utopia where cedar-clad homes with shed roofs tuck into the grassy bluffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean. It has been a beacon for Northern California creative types seeking the idealism of architecture integrated with ecology. Among them is Ivy Ross, the chief design officer for consumer products at Google.

With the architect Suchi Reddy, a longtime collaborator, Ms. Ross renovated a home on the site into a retreat where she can recharge, explore and immerse herself in nature. “I saw this as the house that I was going to be able to go deep into everything that I’m curious about,” Ms. Ross said.

Ms. Reddy, whose design philosophy is “form follows feeling,” tailored the renovation around specific emotions that Ms. Ross wanted to experience in the house, primarily a sense of wonder as well as relaxation. To inform her architectural interventions, she turned to the lessons of neuroaesthetics, a growing field of study about how what we see, feel and hear affects us physically, psychologically and emotionally.

Unlike feng shui or the 60-30-10 ratio for balancing colors, approaches based more on universal rules, neuroaesthetics foregrounds how individuals perceive a space. Where feng shui, which focuses on energetic flow through a space, encourages using houseplants to create a connection to nature, neuroaesthetics isn’t as literal; using stone and wood can foster a similar effect, per the philosophy.

Designers who bring neuroaesthetics into their practice argue that when it comes to health, we focus so much on what goes into our bodies, but not the spaces and places our bodies inhabit, even though they play a role in our well-being.

Some of the neuroaesthetics-informed principles Ms. Reddy relied on for Ms. Ross’s space include biophilia, or the prioritization of nature; balancing a sense of expansiveness and enclosure; and a natural materials palette.

“The traditional way people think about architecture — and nobody says it — but it’s really of resale,” said Ms. Reddy, founder of the New York-based firm Reddymade Design. “They’re always thinking about designing it for somebody else who’s going to want to buy this thing.”

Instead, Ms. Reddy continued, we should “gear the compass of design towards this idea of empathetic, responsive environments that make us feel like our best selves.”

Ms. Ross described the project as “divine intervention.” Sea Ranch homes rarely go up for sale and just as she was about to begin building a house a few miles up the coast, a property in the development completed in 1988 hit the market.

The 4,300-square-foot, three-bedroom, four-bathroom home, which she purchased for $3.18 million in 2018, didn’t share the same architectural pedigree as the original structures designed by MLTW and Joseph Esherick in a landscape masterminded by Lawrence Halprin. But its location — right on the edge of a cliff — was spectacular.

“It was on a particular point at Sea Ranch where it wasn’t just calm,” Ms. Ross said. “It represented all of life and death and dark and light because it was a place where trees had ripped and fallen into the ocean. It was just alive with energy and nature.”

The challenge for Ms. Reddy became redesigning the space to better attenuate its surroundings, making it both a portal into the landscape as well as a refuge from it.

“We had to really both embrace it and give this sense of safety because Sea Ranch can be beautifully light and amazing but also, if it’s dark and raining and gray, it can be existentially kind of depressing,” Ms. Reddy said.

The gut renovation began in 2021 and cost $900,000. It primarily involved adapting the floor plan. The existing design had numerous small rooms, which Ms. Reddy opened into a free-flowing layout. She swapped the locations of the living room and bedroom, which are on opposite ends of the house, so that Ms. Ross could have sweeping ocean views from the living space and a better angle for the sunset from her room. She then created a dining nook where the kitchen once was and moved the kitchen to a space adjacent to the living room.

Ms. Ross sought a “quiet canvas” that wouldn’t compete with the outdoors. The choices of materials dial up the connection to nature and also provide subtle texture throughout the space.

To that end, Ms. Reddy kept the original slate floors and cedar ceilings. She added cedar to the primary bedroom walls to enhance the sense of warmth and brought in a hinoki soaking tub to the primary bathroom. For the guest bathroom, which had uncomfortable, too-tall ceilings, she designed an eight-foot-tall wood light fixture with a pink acrylic shade to correct the space’s proportions.

“You feel like you’re in a James Turrell looking up,” Ms. Reddy said, referring to the American artist.

In the library, which can convert to a guest room thanks to a Murphy bed, Ms. Reddy installed open shelving for Ms. Ross’s extensive collection of crystals, many of which she harvested herself. This summer, Ms. Ross added the finishing touch to the room: a sound tube instrument by Wolfgang Deinert, who, inspired by his deaf son, created the piece to illustrate the difference between listening, hearing and sensing the vibratory resonance of sound. Ms. Ross uses it for therapeutic purposes.

“What happens to me is sometimes I become a sound wave,” she said. “If I’m playing with it for a long time, all my cells light up and I almost dissolve into just being pure essence. It’s beyond relaxation.”

On a typical day at the house, Ms. Ross heads to the library when she wants to focus on her research; she perches in the living room, which she compares with being on a ship, for meditative moments; and, when she is tackling big problems, she visits the balcony for a front-row seat to the expansive panorama.

“I think we’re all craving a little bit to get out of our cognitive mind and into our bodies,” Ms. Ross said.