How Wooden Design Enhances User Satisfaction in Concert Halls: The Serial Mediating Roles of Flow Experience and Place Attachment

In the field of cultural architecture design, the deep impact mechanisms of wooden material design perception on users’ psychological experiences have not yet been fully elucidated. The interior environmental design of concert halls, as venues for immersive artistic experiences, especially the use of natural materials such as wood, is considered a key factor shaping audience perception and experience. However, existing research has largely focused on the acoustic performance of or visual preferences for wooden materials, while there remains a lack of mechanistic explanations for how wooden design perception systematically enhances users’ overall satisfaction through a series of internal psychological processes. Based on the “stimulus–organism–response” theoretical framework, this study proposes a chain mediation model aimed at exploring how perception of wooden design in concert halls enhances user satisfaction by promoting users’ flow experience and subsequently strengthening their place attachment. Through a cross-sectional survey of 1017 audiences with actual experience in wooden concert halls and analysis of the data using covariance-based structural equation modeling, the findings reveal that: (1) perception of wooden design has a significant direct positive effect on user satisfaction; (2) both flow experience and place attachment independently mediate the influence of wooden design perception on user satisfaction; (3) there exists a significant chain mediation path: “perception of wooden design → flow experience → place attachment → user satisfaction”. This study validates, from an architectural psychology perspective, the role of flow and place attachment as consecutive psychological mechanisms. The research provides empirical evidence for architects to use wood as a psychological intervention tool in cultural spaces, transforming material selection from an aesthetic consideration into a systematic design strategy with measurable psychological outcomes.