Carlo Battisti - a vision for biophilic architecture and interiors in regenerative real estate

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An interview with Carlo Battisti, President of Living Future Europe.

Carlo qualified as a Civil Engineer from Milan's prestigious Politécnico University and now specializes in sustainable innovation and project management.

He is certified with LEED for green buildings, and WELL for healthy buildings and natural systems, amongst a host of other professional accreditations.

Biophilic Architecture - a Regenerative real estate vision

Here we discuss the the connection to nature between biophilic design, beauty and wellbeing from the perspective of the International Living Future Institute.

We also look at the concept of restorative real estate developments, and even at how the Bolzano area of Italy that he is in has carved out a role for itself as a sustainable innovation hub within Italy.

This is a dense but extremely dynamic conversation advocating for going beyond merely sustainable buildings.

I really felt I was in the presence of someone who has completely mastered his art and is now committed to giving back to society by sharing that knowledge through a range of different mediums, including but not limited to podcasts!

• https://www.living-future.eu/biophilic-society/

• https://www.living-future.eu/biophilia-summit-2023-call-for-abstracts-is-open/

• https://www.instagram.com/lfeurope/

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Full transcript follows courtesy of Otter.ai - please excuse any typos errors!

International Living Future Institute - biophilic design and regenerative real estate leader

Matt Morley

Carlo thank you so much for joining us on the show. I'm looking forward to our conversation, it's going to cover a lot. But I know you'll, you'll have the expertise to make it succinct, and also to help make it manageable for people to understand, because there's a lot for us to cover. So why don't we begin? Let's give an introduction to the ILFI.

Carlo Battisti

Yeah, surely. So first of all, I'm a building engineer by background, I've been working for 20 years in construction firms. Now it's already 15 years I'm dealing with sustainability and innovation in the building industry.

Living Building Challenge

I started dealing with sustainability standards, let's say, around 10 years ago, or even more, I discovered the Living Building Challenge, which is really the most ambitious sustainability standard for building occupants and the built environment.

I remember I went to Portland, USA for the annual flagship conference, Living Future 2014. I remember I was the only European in the room - "what are you doing here" they all said! I came back home with my brain full of ideas, and the work that they're doing is always amazing, even now.

Sustainability Standards

So it's really disruptive, because, you know, there are many sustainability standards out there are many conversation about how to make the bidding industry greener.

But the LBC really set the bar much higher. And knowing that the progress that we've been achieving in terms of the debates in the media industry, it's all still barely visible so we need to do much more.

The radical concept behind everything is really to move from a less bad to a more good scenario.

Restorative first, then Regenerative Buildings

So having a built environment could be restorative first and then regenerative, really improving the conditions for the environment and making possible an ecosystem that thrives, with personal and human connection and thriving in a regenerative way within the built environment.

Given that we know we are impacting the built environment generally, on all the sectors and environment more in general, we need to do much more. This living breathing channel framework is really a very holistic approach based on the metaphor of a building as a flower.

ILFI's seven petals

So there is this concept of the seven petals, the ILFI is basically developing these standards covering buildings have been in progress companies, communities, and office buildings and so forth and so on.

And we as Living Future Europe started opening their first European office in 2018. Now, we are an independent legal entity, we are basically promoting their programs across Europe with different activities to do with biophilic architecture, biophilic design principles and so on.

A career in biophilic design and the interior environment

Matt Morley

You mentioned your own professional background. A lot of people ask me how to get into this industry? What's the best way in? You know, how do we study for biophilic design? Or how do we study to get into the space that you're in? And it's not always an obvious response?

I think I see a lot of architects, engineers, project managers, from your position for someone interested in the space around green buildings, healthy buildings, commercial buildings that enhance well being and actually give back rather than take away from nature.

What are the usual roots in and where do you see education feeding into this space for interior designers and biophilic design experts in the future?

Developing expertise in biophilic design principles

Carlo Battisti

Yeah, that's a good point, in my personal experience, the process was very long. I don't know why it happened this way that's just life! I arrived to this point.

After many years in the construction industry but you can imagine what that was like in the 90s, or at the end of the last millenium, the situation was completely different - much less concern about the natural environment and natural materials.

The mantra was, if you remember, to just build, build, build and sell, and there was no particular attention on sustainability, outdoor space, green space, natural features.

Now, it's true that we are dealing with sustainability already for like two or three decades, considering all of the standards the framework that been developed in the same moment.

A career in biophilic architecture and the built environment

So for people starting their career now, it's really a bit different. This sustainability issue, this tension to sustainability, this need is so important that it's clearly the main focus not only for the building industry and architects or engineers but all economic sectors should really address this need for a more human connection, well being and biophilic design focuses in a more effective way.

It's important to have some technical, robust background because in the end, that is how you can deliver things. That is important.

Understanding real estate and construction

You need to know the processes behind real estate construction and biophilic design for an interior space for example, you need to know what you're basically doing as a designer, as a manufacturer, as a general contractor, because this is really what in the end impacts on the end result.

Also, in terms of sustainability and green buildings, it's important now that everything we are working with is really embedded in a broader sustainability concept.

So sustainability, in other terms, should be in the DNA of what we do as designers, contractors, or building product manufacturers, real estate developers, and so on.

Challenges in integrating biophilic design principles in built environment

I see there are really huge challenges ahead still. Like for instance, this Living Building Challenge also in the title is a ''challenge'! It's not easy, it's difficult to achieve a fully regenerative built environment.

On the other hand, I personally see a huge amount of opportunities for young professionals. And moreover, they have a really a different background. So consider, for instance, the Greta Thunberg movement to protect our natural habitat in modern society.

They have a really different approach, they know that we could do things better, that's why they are more open minded, they can really address these topics in a more effective way. Probably better that some senior professionals,

Matt Morley

For me , it was a decade working for a real estate developer, and then I moved across and transitioned into sustainability standards, organic materials, the health benefits of biophilic design strategies in an urban environment, how to integrate organic forms when evoking nature, and more generally what we term biophilic design principles in real estate and interiors from there.

Maybe that means I'm more limited, because I see new generations coming up already and they just start on the sustainability path much, much earlier than me so they leave university with really deep knowledge.

I think there's benefits to both routes still, both groups are coexisting in the job market but the new generation coming up are arguably starting even earlier than that we were able to! It's a process of human evolution I guess.

Living Building Challenge applied to urban environments

You mentioned the Living Building Challenge, we also have the Living Product Challenge, I think it's important to make that connection between the building itself and the elements that go into it, that contribute to creating a more regenerative building.

So the product challenge, it's like a sustainability standard for building components in a sense, right?

Carlo Battisti

Yeah, it's true, in fact, the frameworks really cover the entire biophilic design supply chain because they quickly understood that you need to address the entire supply chain from the developers up to the end users, because they're all parts of the same big picture if your goal is to achieve true sustainability in the built environment.

Product manufacturers in the built environment

So where is real success in sustainability to be found? Sometimes it's on the shoulders of building product manufacturers, because the way they are producing or designing their own products is really key in terms of achieving some sustainability results.

Under this perspective, the Living Product Challenge is a fantastic framework, really a Circular Economy standard or certification. So it is sort of party verified, as basically it's the application of say of the Living Building Challenge, our company is really producing a specific product in its supply chain in its factory, it is production line, following regenerative principles, so how they're producing and consuming energy from renewable sources, how they're managing the water cycle, how they're managing the waste products, is the product inspired by Biophilia or by biomimicry in some cases?

A supply chain perspective

Are they addressing this concept of beauty in the way they are producing things? What are the relationship between the company and their stakeholders, the community, their employees?

It's really a very broad and full regenerative approach with a really a circular entity in the end. I see that there are some amazing companies that register and certify their products with the Living Product challenge.

Declare label for well being

One company started with the Declare label, you know this ingredient label of forbidden products, and then they moved on to the Living Product Challenge, registered all of the catalog, and now they're producing what are considered to be the more sustainable office furniture on the market - desks, chairs, and so on.

They've been able to avoid some harmful substances that were typical in the furniture industry, like, for instance, chromium six, like PVC, formaldehyde and other harmful ingredients.

So this implies that you have like to put in place, also some innovative ideas to change your process to transform your production lines, which is not easy. Moreover, for some big industry, but these changes that they're making are really beacons of light.

And in the industry, they can also act as demonstrators that these changes are really possible. And once they they do it, then others will come, the others will follow.

Eco labels and the healthy material connection to nature

Matt Morley

To place some context on that, a lot of the products with a some kind of an eco label are often really just saying, well, it's non toxic, it is not doing harm to the indoor air environment, for example, if you place our products in your interior space, or if you use our paint, or use our adhesive.

What you're describing is something much more advanced and comprehensive and holistic in that you're looking at a far wider range of factors.

So for me, anything that's coming out with a DECLARE or even Living Product Challenge certification, it's absolutely the gold standard, it really is lightyears ahead of everything else.

I imagine that that means it is also much harder for those companies to satisfy those standards, because you're just asking a lot more from them!

They are also leading the way, right, they're showing what is possible, and being the early adopters, for the others to then follow. I think in the future, it might be a basic starting point. But to go beyond that, you need something like what you've just described?

Carlo Battisti

The healthy products debate

Yeah, well, there is you know is a big issue with healthy products in the built environment and the building industry. So let me be very frank on this.

The developer that built the Bullitt Center where International Living Future Institute in the US are based, it's in Seattle, he used to say that being compliant with the norm is only one step above being illegal.

And that through sometimes, if you remember, we took like 20 years to ban some harmful substances that we discovered were completely critical. And, and chemistry is running really faster than our capacity to understand what's happening.

You know, if this product, the products that we are using in our indoor spaces are healthy, are safe, or not. So that's why it's true, that could be challenging for these companies to demonstrate how good they are in doing some things, but it's really covering this real addressing sort of social issue this up dramatically important, so our human health, and the health of future generations.

Building product manufacturers

So we discovered that we need to start asking more from building product manufacturers to put more questions to to request the same level of transparency, for instance, we used to have in the food industry or in the textile industry.

So we learned we started learning, let's say to read into these labels to put questions so what's the product where the product is coming from? How the product is made? What are the ingredients if they're harmful or not?

Healthy building products

So this is crucially important so that's why it's true that this be challenged but it's basically covering our rights to be health healthy to see in the end and this is absolutely a level let's say of the bar that we cannot like like really say reduce because this is really very much connected with the health of our persons our people say

Matt Morley

It's almost like taking your building to the doctor's right and the doctor is looking for the the unhealthy points and recommending how to improve the health of the building and for many people it's easier not to worry about that you know you think about your own health maybe think about the quality or this the know how your food ingredients have been sourced but for many people to think about mental health of the building or the home you live in it's it's just not something.

Product standards are not high enough

Carlo Battisti

They say okay, the product should be comply with the norms. Okay, that's fine, but probably it's not enough. For instance, you are for sure following this discussion about the PFAs. Now the so there was this group of 17 June also newspapers magazine from all over Europe that completed this tremendous survey and investigation, let's say, on Where are where is PFAs in Europe, and... it's everywhere.

Red List Chemicals vs natural materials

And this is something that is used in the building industry, so the ILFI every year is updating the so called the Red List. And last year they included 11,000, new PFAs numbers in this list.

So just to say that, how is it possible for designers, but also for end users to follow all of these products, these natural materials, all of these processes are all of these developments in the chemical industry.

Declare label of ingredients

So that's why this demand of healthy products, for instance, the Declare label, is that really addressing this request is so important, because the question is really "what's in the product"? And is this ingredient harmful or not? You have to tell me, You mean in your bill in parliament of factors.

This is compliant with the so called Precautionary Principle that, for instance, in Europe is pretty common, but United States it's not so really accepted in the economy for instance, is still valid that architects and designers in the US guarantee that the product they use in the buildings are safe, not the manufacturers.

So understand it's completely nonsense is the manufacturer, that should be really the first to say, okay, my product is totally healthy and safe. That's why I can put it on the market, it's not the other way around that the end user should demonstrate that the product is safe is safe.

Standards for biophilic architecture and regeneration

Matt Morley

You mentioned the relationship there between the architects specifying individual products and imagine, you know, on a complete refurb, or new construction, there's a huge amount of information that they need to gather to process.

And then obviously, they know that they've got aesthetic concerns form and function, they've got budget, they've got to develop a client behind them, pushing them in one direction maybe being pulled in multiple directions.

At the same time. It's complex. How does the role of the type of green building certifications that you offer via Living Future Europe? How can that play a role in simplifying or providing guidance in that process?

So that there's a there's a roadmap for them to follow? Is that is that one of the advantages in doing it? Or is it more a case of having an extra resource on board who can help to bring new expertise to the consultancy team on development project?

Carlo Battisti

Yeah, I will say the work that I did for instance, with the Declare label was exactly to reconnect people and designers with the building industry, because in the end, they have been really disconnected in the last decades.

So we believe that the products are safer we live with believes that the manufacturers are doing their work properly. Sometimes we need to put more questions to look into into it. And like just for instance, really, this decline label is very simple.

So it's sort of an ingredients label for building products, where you can find all of the information on the building products, for instance, also, the expectance, let's say of life, what will be the let's say the final use of the product if the product could be recyclable, compostable, reusable, also the co2 emissions number connected through the product production.

Lifecycle assessment

So that you can also use this data for the lifecycle assessment of your building, and also of your product itself. So where the product is manufactured. So basically, it's a way to prove to provide in a simpler way complex information to and use it to the market.

This information are available on some database, and they'll say, as you said, so the role that these green building standards really played in the last decades is really to make to highlight the importance of this information sometimes could be a bit confusing.

I agree with you there is a really a plethora of labels and standards and certifications, sometimes they'll self declare sometimes that third third party verified. So it's really difficult for for end user for designers, we are really trying to make the things simpler, really starting from from the basic question, is this product safe or not?

Toxic substances in building materials

Are there in some harmful or toxic ingredients of substances or not? Then clearly, you as designer, architect and engineer they have they have to couple this information with other performance data because in the end, the product should be also performing for the purposes You select it, if it is like a flooring or structural elements on so forth, and so forth and so on.

But yeah, so we have to combine all of these things together search the right information. There are already some databases available. publicly for for designers. It's a bit complex, you have to take really holistic approach.

But I'd say this is also very interesting and, and absolutely motivated for, for the architects and engineers, because in the end, they're really responsible for the work they're doing. And the bill is they're creating the life of people who will leave in those buildings, so and they will live their life for decades.

So in the end, it's a sort of responsibility or responsible role that the planners the designers are are taking. It's, you know, it's a bit different. Compared to what happened, let's say, decades ago, we were talking only about like some architectural elements, the shape, or the layout of a building.

We were like discussing many times or the color of the ceramic tiles, but probably they are more important things to come into.

Biophilic design combines sustainability and wellbeing

Matt Morley

And how do you see biophilic design fitting into that? I've often thought of it as being this interesting hybrid of healthy buildings or healthy wellness interiors, and biophilic design focuses, and sustainability.

Biophilic Society Europe

I was interested with your role, both from the Biophilic Society in Europe, but then also with the connection to the ILFI's biophilic design initiative that always seems to get amazing amounts of press is popping up on my my Google searches every day, it seems that their various prizes and awards.

How does biophilic design fit into this? Is it both healthy and sustainable at the same time? Or how do you see that structure?

Biophilic design to enhance well being and connection to nature

Carlo Battisti

Now, very good point, Matt. Because in by chance, it is always a not by chance back to the previous version of the standard of Living Building Challenge, the 3.1 version, the Biophilia concept was embedded in the health and happiness petal.

Now with the new version, the fourth version, which has been launched in 2019, it has been moved to the beauty petal. So to recognize that Biophilia is not only about how healthy the indoor spaces are, but it's also something more... so really addressing the beauty concept of a building.

And this is very much embedded in the standard Living Building Challenge things we are doing, we really discovered that we need to address this concept in a more effective way.

This is something for instance, that popped up, let's say dramatically during the pandemic. So during the pandemic time, we were blocking our lockdown in our cities and our builders, we discovered how important it was leaving in some beautiful biophilic interior spaces and of races looking out of your window to like a park or a garden or biophilic places instead of a concrete building.

Natural landscapes

How different was our perception of the world around us, where we were basically obliged to stay in lockdown for more than 90% of our daily time, which is something that basically we are always doing like for instance, this, like this moment, we are both in some enclosed spaces.

So all these spaces are are designed and made this is really important. So we started addressing this concept of a more effective way. We started with this Biophilia campaign last year in the woods of South till the end of September.

So we basically convene 15 professionals from all over Europe, there was also a couple of persons from the Middle East, the one person from the United States, so to work and trained and live together for four days, in really very much connected with nature, with some indoor and outdoor activities from this Biophilia camp, this idea of Biophilic Society came out.

So the biophilic society is not only like the society or biophilic law or something like the societies in London in the 19th centuries. Remember, there were societies for everything. So it's not only the Society of biophilic people, but it's also the concept that society could be more biophilic.

A connection to nature

And that our message is really that reconnecting with nature could be really an effective way to save, let's say, our life, let's say in the next decades and center, so this is absolutely important that that's why we started with, with some activities by Finnish societies, basically a network or as we used to call it a linear system of passionate people around Europe and also outside the Europe.

We are meeting on a monthly basis, presenting some case studies and experiences. And now we are organizing this Biophilia Summit, which will be online on the seventh of June, 2023. It is online because it is the easier way for, for us to say to connect, the more people possible.

Even if clearly, meeting in person could be a better idea, but for the first time, the idea is really to have a larger participation and also to address by failure, not only on the architectural sectors are not not only biophilic design, but also put in by a fee in connection with other sectors like racism, with agriculture, with psychology. And obviously, also with with architecture with photography.

So there will be many examples of how we can read Biophilia through different lenses. And we are absolutely encouraging your followers to connect on the seventh of June, for a full day with a lot of fantastic speakers.

Matt Morley

Natural light and much more

So it will include the links to that in the show notes. And then the relationship between the potential of biophilia to create spaces that not only provide beauty natural light, but also mental and physical well being for the occupants in the space.

And then also, whilst not doing any harm, and ideally, giving something back to the environment around it, to transition from that type of concept into restorative sustainability, use the words early restore and then regenerate.

Perhaps it's worth just clarifying that and if you if there's a distinction between them in your mind if they have two phases, if one leads to the other, and perhaps Yeah, just to understand how we use those terms precisely around "restorative" sustainability and "regenerative".

Regenerative real estate and interior space

Carlo Battisti

Now, that's absolutely an important question. So it's important to clarify. So, we start again from Biophilia. So Biophilia is really embedded in this discussion or conversation about sustainability because reconnecting with nature is something that's vitally important.

So one of the main problem and one of the reasons why we came to this situation stems with this ecological global crisis is really the fact that we we really disconnected from nature, we really didn't understand the natural processes and flows and so forth and so on.

And also our life and our activities are really impacting on the environment and the environment is basically around us, we are parts of the environment, we are part of nature, we have the same natural elements together with other living species.

So we are always say in the same situation, the the point of sustainability is very important, because, you know, sometimes we are, so obviously, often we are very confused about this terms of sustainability, because everyone is really providing us a different explanation, a different description of sustainability.

And this is something where we should be more really very clear. So for us sustainability is a is a is really giving back to the environment, what we have been taken off. So it's really sort of zero points in the diagram, you can imagine a diagram, comparing, let's say, our actions and the impact on on on the environment.

Towards Net Zero buildings

So it's really the net zero point in this diagram, and we haven't reached out this point is still so we are still free, again, within the built environment doing less bad.

So we are designing and building buildings that are less consuming, less impacting, doing less harm. So sometimes it's also frustrating because it's always a negative concept. Again, talking about green buildings, there are buildings that they're basically doing less harm, they're not even sustainable. They're not still say sustainable.

For instance, this definition of sustainability is something that also Yvon Chouinard from Patagonia is basically providers the same, the same concept, he says, We shouldn't start, we should, we shouldn't talk about sustainability, until we really give back to the environment what we took off.

So only from that point on, we can really talk about sustainability, moving forward on this sort of ideal S curve is becoming restorative. So basically, again, talking about the built environment, or the action we can do in the built environment is really recovering the damage that we did in the past years.

Because we did a lot of damage and so weak but we can recover this previous situation and move moving forward toward a more exotic conservation means that we should really create the conditions for the built environment, the building system, and the let's say the ecosystem around us to thrive in a continuous way, in a permanent way, really as living organisms say, are we able to conceive, like, for instance, a building performance, his weight, yes, it's possible.

He's also technologically and financially via variable. So it's like, for instance, a building that is completely done with safe materials, that is producing more energy that consumes from renewable sources, and so forth and so on.

That is, let's say, providing benefits and positive effects on people and living species and beings, and so forth, and so on. So it's really a sort of dynamic concept of sustainability. And if we are always, let's say, comparing the effects of our actions to the built environment, or what's happening in terms of ecological global crisis, so where we know that we already exceeded exceeded some of the planetary boundaries, we we understand immediately that we have the urgency to do much more to do much better now.

So without like, waiting for for four years without, let's say, planning some magical roadmap, so we need to act really quickly, immediately. And the good news is that we have all of the expertise or all of the technologies and techniques available, or the materials, the strategies is really about to be be be more convinced and be more responsible of what we're doing, and and walk the talk basically, and put this this country concrete strategies into action.

Matt Morley

And in your advisory services, then how are you working with the industry? Is that typically, you collaborating with developers?

Are you spreading the message around sustainable buildings and this particular interpretation architectural design that you have of how they can do more good at a sort of purely information level?

Or are you working on a commercial scale with developers on for example, tenders or feasibility studies as well?

Carlo Battisti

We really try to spread the word on all the levels possible on the entire supply chain, with training, workshops... Education is really key. Because it's really about creating a different culture, as you can imagine, so from the end of last year, we started also provided some advisory services for some specific projects.

So we understood that it's important to follow some exemplary projects, and bring them forward, let's say to the end, so that they can become real, and they can actually act really as demonstrators of the visibility of these concepts.

Instead of providing like generic answers to all of the inquires we're receiving from from Europe is we did up to last year. Now we are really following some specific projects.

For instance, we are working on a first full Living Building Challenge registered project is Scotland. It's a fantastic school complex with all of the students from the primary to the high school. And basically they are working to create this pavilion where they will teach sustainability to their students and also to their community.

So a unique place to deal with this concept. And for instance, we are working together with with the design team on this project. We're also following for instance, a completely different situation - a standard small residential building all made in timber in Madrid, which is pursuing both zero energy and zero carbon certification.

So as you can see, there are many ways to achieve great results. And we are trying to say to work together, we are really working alongside of the consultants in this specific situation in order to, to make this process become real. So it's basically a role of facilitator. Because once these projects, these buildings are finished, then you can really you know, you can explain the case that you can explain how you did it.

And it's probably the best example that you can provide to your stakeholders because in the end, people understand that, okay, this is feasible. This is something I could do. And I would like to do for my home, my new school, my new public building, or my new office building. And, you know, it's a matter of examples sometimes.

Bolzano, Alto-Adige - a sustainability case study

Matt Morley

Very interesting. Let me ask if I may, just one final question because, Bolzano and the region you're in there in Italy just keeps coming up on my radar or has been doing that for well over five or six years. I think something is happening in that part of the natural world too...

I'm really interested to know how much it's feeding your work with inspiration? Is it providing inspiration or what is what is going on in that region, because it just seems to be, particularly within the context of Italy, which, let's be honest, is often not necessarily the first country that comes up, we might think of the Scandinavian countries that are perhaps leading the way on sustainability. But I think there's something happening in that quarter of the country, right?

Carlo Battisti

I would say that the local autonomous government is really providing a lot of great marketing, let's say, this is could be one point!

No, it's true that some specific data is a very specific situation in Italy, also, due to the fact that is local autonomous government.

So it's, it's an autonomous province. So basically, you know, all of the public services are managed locally. And sometimes people really understand how their money has been coming from taxes, has been spent, you know, schools or hospitals are managed by the local government, there are other services like for instance, police post justice, that clearly are managed at the national level. So this could be one of the explanation.

Or another explanation is the fact that there's really a sort of a ring in the chain between the Mediterranean and the Nordic environment in the same talk in from a drag geographical perspective, here, people are mostly speaking German language. So they are very much connected with the German speaking area.

And for instance, you know, that Germany and Austria and these countries have been always very keen on energy efficiency thinks for instance, here, there is a standard that stopped that we've been basically created like already more than 20 years ago, and added efficiency standard, which is mandatory for the local local builders.

So it started with energy efficiency, and then from energy efficiency, basically, this conversation of sustainability, got a broader perspective. Say it's a small region with 500,000, inhabitants, a lot of nature, a lot of mountains, you know, so in a few minutes, we are in the Mantis, it could be a sensitive environment.

So because you know, there could be like some trade offs, like, for instance, out to attract more tourists, which is something that is interesting for the economy, but without impact on the environment.

So this is a huge trade off. And this is something that is now every day in the news, because there is really a tension between these two aspects. So it's an important conversation that probably will take another another an hour to be addressed.

But again, probably this close proximity with nature is something that inspires people. More I, I moved here like years ago, so I'm not from from this region, as many others did.

And I wouldn't return back, let's be frank, I like to be here. And it's considered also, again, the most probably the more sustainable region in terms of sustainability approach, in Italy, say, so.

And that's why it's good to be here, there is this nitec Park, this noise, an acronym for nature of innovation, but it's also it's also a different understanding in terms of explanation in German, and in Italian, because it's hot in Italian. And it's also new in German.

So with the same acronym, the same term were basically addressed to the three languages, it's absolutely a great place to it's technological Park is basically, it's the renovation of an existing aluminium production plant that was used between the two World Wars.

It's a 12 hectares area acquired by the local government, and now under a huge transformation, really to create this technological park where there are startups, tech companies, and so forth. And so we settled here in 2018.

And it's absolutely a great opportunity to be here to connect with other research centers, companies, startups, you know, an eight, it's all about innovation. It's, it's a great initiative. So the idea was really, to put all these different actors in the same place.

And for the sole fact that you are meeting the real at the bar and drinking a coffee and you start talking about you know, your ID, and then you discover that could be a company interested in developing your ID or Research Center, study your ID and moving forward to create something more concrete so it's basically how this innovation processes start.

And that's why it makes sense to have this big, huge facilitator tool to help the innovation try I have here in the in the region.

Matt Morley

Wonderful. Well, thank you so much. That was really a fascinating conversation. Anyone interested in connecting with you or learning more about your initiatives or following along, which social media channels are you using for your communications?

Carlo Battisti

Well, so we are pretty active on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. So follow Living Future Europe.

We are generally updating daily, probably to much! We are doing many things because we understood that there are many topics to cover, you know, the building industry, the built environment is a bit complex, it is touching many angles.

So that's why we are really working on some topics that we find very important and key for our development. So please follow us and let us know if you need any information. I'm happy to provide them.

https://www.living-future.eu/

https://www.living-future.eu/biophilic-society/

https://www.living-future.eu/biophilia-summit-2023-call-for-abstracts-is-open/

Examples of biophilic design interiors cannabis retail stores

Biofilico biophilic design consultants review the best retail interior design concepts for medical cannabis stores in north america

Alchemy Downtown Toronto, Canada - example biophilic interior design

Alchemy is a Toronto-based cannabis dispensary brand that not only delivers a nature-based product but a customer experience inspired by biophilic design.

Designed by the Studio Paolo Ferrari, the Alchemy Downtown Toronto cannabis retail store shows influences of art, nature, and technology fused into an elevated space. The result is a sublime yet upbeat atmosphere, rather like the effects brought on by many of the products on sale here.

High technical ingenuity and healthy building materials combine to create a contemporary retail space with a touch of class in an otherwise neglected corner of the retail design industry. Things are now changing for the better with these nature-inspired dispensaries however.

Walking through the cannabis store space feels like a luxury, high fashion experience. Within the foyer, a large skylight shines down upon a circular garden central to the room. At its center, a tree sapling grows tall reaching toward the light cascading down from above. Along its sides, large-leafed plants spiral out into the white room surrounding the indoor garden. At its base, a layer of undergrowth fills the small ‘forest floor’.

Further elements of earthy, biophilic design are brought into the room through whitewashed ash wood. An organically shaped pillar of this material accompanies a curvilinear wood table that bends around the ash pole.

The strong, sunshine yellow accents present within the space are an essential element in the overall aesthetic while natural light is brought into the store via yellow-tinted glass.

Finally, circles are a recurring design theme here: a circular pattern marked by a change in material was created on the floor. In the ceiling a circle of acoustic sound-absorbing material creates a dark circle while on the walls, circular mirrors reflect back the displays of merchandise, even one of the retail store’s rooms is circular.

https://alchemycannaco.com/about/

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City Cannabis Vancouver - nature inspired interior design

This dispensary is what we would classify as a classic example of biophilic interior design. A welcome desk with a curvilinear form of a quarter circle incorporates wood paneling while on the wall behind the reception this wood paneling extends to full height, introducing a large chunk of timber into the visual experience. Each section of paneling is three dimensional in nature protruding a couple inches from the wall.

Moving into the interior of the cannabis dispensary, the wooden panelling covers the two long parallel walls. The beaming goes up each side of the wall and bends like an arch before it meets the corner. The beaming bends toward each-other and connects in the middle surrounding the room in small wooden arches.

A retail display table is a continuous piece of whitewashed wood. It extends to around 20 feet as one solid piece of organically shaped timber.

Lighting creates abstract patterns into the space, as if replicating light filtering in through a forest canopy overhead, inevitably unordered and fractal. Also placed within these nooks, an assortment of artificial plants decorates the ceiling and walls of the space, no doubt a response to low light / maintenance priorities. Placed with intent, they appear to grow outwards and are concentrated within corners of the space.

This greenery cascading down the walls and across the ceiling when combined with living plants and potted birch trees gives the dispensary a tangible connection to nature and biophilic design, the perfect backdrop for their plant-based products.

https://www.citycannabis.co/location/cambie-st/

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Etain Health NYC - biophilic design in medical cannabis dispensary

Female-owned Etain Health located in New York integrates biophilic design into their health and wellness focused medical cannabis dispensary store by Clodagh.

As shown above, a dominant feature of the space is a 20 ft living plant wall. beneath a skylight.with supplementary high-lux LED lights that give the plants what they need to survive in the long-term, all year round.

Thanks to adequate light levels and an in-built irrigation system, there are close on 2500 plants in the wall providing not just air=purifying benefits (neutralizing volatile organic compounds while absorbing mildew and spores) for the space but also a sense of calm and natural vitality from bringing the outside world in.

A Feng Shui water feature provides natural background noise through the movement of running water. From wall to floor, natural elements of oak wood and stone are used to create a reassuring, zen interior.

https://etainhealth.com/Biophila-green-plant-wall/

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Dockside Cannabis Seattle

https://www.dezeen.com/2019/11/19/graham-baba-architects-seattle-cannabis-dispensary/

Located in Seattle, Washington, Dockside Cannabis was converted into a local dispensary clinic from a pre-existing structure. It was designed to redefine the typical, often uninspiring retail experience of marijuana through the creation of a tranquil and inviting environment inspired by biophilic design interiors.

Making not only the interior of the building look open and welcoming but also the exterior facade was intended to reduce any lingering stigma around entering a marijuana store. Large windows fill the wall allowing light fill the interior space. They are complemented by a large skylight above and organic, wabi-sabi wood displays below.

Sunshine filters downward through the scissor trusses forming unique shadows within the space. From the trusses, hanging plants flourish under the natural lighting. Vines grow down into the space from these hanging plants alongside a variety of other living plants to create an abundant nature-inspired interior experience inspired by nature.

https://www.docksidecannabis.com/

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Dutch Love Ottawa

Dutch love is a cannabis dispensary located in Ottawa, Ontario that has taken a unique twist on biophilic design in its retail interiors, primarily via a clever feature in their display table joinery that uses opaque sheets of backlit plastic board with a plethora of potted plants inside, kept alive with grow lights built into the cabinetry.

By leveraging a feature of cannabis production in the interiors, while also connecting with biophilia and nature in this way, the store immediately stands out from the crowd. The rest of the space is neutral, with whitewashed walls and minimalist wood shelving structures for product displays, pot plants and lamps.

Filing the space between each storage shelf are slabs of material placed within the cubby made from an array of materials, from organically broken pieces of rock sitting next to each other, to large slabs of wood, and polished slabs of stone.

https://dutch.love

Best Examples of Biophilic Design in Healthcare: Dental Clinic and Wellness Center — Biofilico Wellness Interiors

Biophilic design integrates both wellness design interiors and sustainable interior concepts, making use of biophilic design elements such as natural building and furniture materials, shared green spaces, and natural patterns to create an ideal fit for healthcare clinics, wellness centres, and dental clinics. These elements enhance the functional and physical value of healthcare environments by promoting stress reduction and improved cognitive function. Collaboration with healthcare professionals is crucial for the successful implementation and future development of biophilic design.

Key concepts on evidence in the examples below include air purifying plants, natural colour palettes, circular materials that can be recycled at their end of life, abundant natural light aswell as patterns, textures and finishes that evoke the natural world in healthcare settings. The advancement of scientific and medical knowledge plays a significant role in supporting the benefits of biophilic design in healthcare.

Dentista Amsterdam - dental clinic biophilic design interiors with natural elements

https://www.dentista.nl/

Interiors by i29 interior architects

Dentista is a design-conscious dental clinic located in Amsterdam designed by i29 Architects that offers a dental experience designed for mental wellbeing and calm relaxation, despite the potential stressor of dental surgery. Biophilic design within the hospital environment can significantly enhance the health and well-being of patients by creating a more comfortable and welcoming space.

Abundant natural lighting ensures that plant life can be meaningfully sustained in the long-term, promoting natural circadian rhythms and enhancing mood. The use of natural patterns, such as the presence of natural light, water, and vegetation, helps reduce stress levels and improve patients' physical and psychological well-being.

Walking into the clinic, patients are met with a plant filled window atop a green strip of flooring. Down the line of sight they are met with the white of a medical building accompanied by a complement of wood furnishings. A green reception desk is color blocked by a green floor ceiling and wall.

The rest of the clinic’s interior hallways are pure white, ensuring the attention is drawn to an inner courtyard garden full of plants, providing an unexpected centre piece to the clinic experience. Trees, shrubbery and grasses make up the garden atop a pebble floor of white stone.

Within each ‘box’ (treatment room), a soothing green accent wall and ceiling skylight continue the biophilic design interior theme.

This is an example of how an image of medical professionalism and health can be enhanced with the integration of biophilic design principles

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The Well, NYC - biophilic design wellness centre with natural materials

https://www.the-well.com/new-york

Interiors by Rose Ink Workshop and Spector Group

Located within the heart of New York City, The Well is an integrated health experience that combines medical doctors and personal trainers, meditation spaces, saunas, and ancient healing techniques in one single practice, making it an ideal venue for biophilic design interiors that promote a connection with nature and create healing healthcare environments. The design also incorporates outdoor spaces such as patios and rooftop gardens to encourage outdoor activities and social interactions.

East-meets-West mental and physical wellbeing services include acupuncture, personalized wellness consultations, mindful movement, functional fitness, massages, facials, blood work, hormone panels, microbiome testing and genetic testing, to name but a few. The design considers not only their physical needs but also their social and psychological needs, enhancing the overall wellness experience.

Some key amenities of interest within the building include a meditation dome, the rest and recovery room, and the relaxation lounge.

A circular meditation dome is a design focus thanks to its textured floor rug, cushions and earthy colours - creating a balanced, calming space for psychological healing, meditative peace and a rest from the distractions of the outside world. There are surely traces of tribal rituals in this concept.

A ‘rest and recovery room’ gives clients an additional space in which to find their own inner peace for a moment during their visit. Positioned on lounge chairs between a wall of shelved potted plants and a wall of windows, occupants can benefits from the full mental health benefits of biophilic design.

Plants have been proven to reduce stress and boost one’s mood, thereby acting as an essential element of wellbeing interior design. 

A ‘relaxation lounge’ incorporates an organic color scheme along with textured walls, lounge seating surrounding the room, and a mangrove tree table centerpiece. Large selenite crystals surround the room to ensure a healing and calming environment.

St. Elizabeth Healthcare Cancer Center, Kentucky, USA - biophilic design healthcare facilities

https://www.stelizabeth.com/

HGA Architects

The St. Elizabeth Cancer Center in Kentucky pulls together a range of cancer services into a single building while deploying elements of biophilic design in the HGA Architects designed interiors, setting a new standard for healthcare spaces. Collaboration with healthcare professionals is crucial in the design process to ensure that the unique needs of each facility are met.

The center is not only focused on caring for the physical impacts of cancer but on the mental wellness aspects as well, meaning access to the healing power of nature exposure is a key concept.

Located on the first floor for example are centers for yoga, meditation, art and music therapy. This comprehensive wellness program is part of the emotional complement to the physical cancer journey.

A neutral palette of natural colors, abundant natural light, grass-like carpet tiles and plenty of textured finishes make up the interiors.

To reduce the possible stresses of navigating such a large building were color coordinated with uplifting color tones so patients and their family’s intuitively find their way around between departments.

The St. Elizabeth Cancer center creates a comprehensive healing experience for cancer patients, incorporating biophilic design and concern for physical and mental wellbeing during the cancer care journey.

best examples of biophilic design in residential interiors

O Lofos Villa by Blok 722, Greece

organic interior design example

Built on the foothills of Thrypti mountain on the Greek island of Crete lies a hidden villa built with respect to its surroundings.

It is a 280m2 private residence on a sloping terrain. Instead of stairs to balance the natural elevation, a series of levels were created to allow ease of movement physically and visually throughout the space.

When creating this design, the architects pulled from a variety of structural backgrounds combining aspects of vistas from mountains, plains, and the Mediterranean Sea.

This allows it to fit cohesively within its natural setting. The vista has plentiful outdoor areas to promote healthy living.

With the site broken down into multiple smaller segments, movement through nature is encouraged in-between spaces, many of which are outdoors. The main division of the building is linked by a semi enclosed feature where the sounds of giggling water can be heard from a large water feature.

The materials used with the natural villa are largely wood and stone which bring the natural elements of biophilic interior design within its walls.

Painted with a palette of warm greys and beiges, neutral, earthy colors dominate the space. The villa was created with a desire for slow living. Its layout, structure, and divide was created to enhance the lifestyle of its occupants to promote healthy living. 

https://www.block722.com/o-lofos/

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Landmark Pinnacle, London, UK

example biophilic design indoor garden

Rising up above the London skyline as the city’s tallest residential tower, the Landmark Pinnacle was completed in 2022 by architects and interior designers Squire & Partners for developer Chalegrove Properties and Farrer Huxley Associates (FHA) Landscape Architects.

This residential complex has views westward of the River Thames and eastward of the docks of the Thames Barrier. These natural vistas are complemented with an earthy, soothing interior palette of blues, beiges, tans, whites and browns.

Biophilic elements of design such as potted plants, dried flowers and stones ornament the building tying it back to the natural environment. Taking a step further into nature, a floor is dedicated to pulling its occupants out of the cityscape.

Residing on the 27th floor of the building, a residential tropical garden brings the outside world in with a carefully curated collection of plants and indoor trees, the space is perfect for watching the sun rise or set as natural light shoots through the open elaborate floor of plants.

There are spaces for lounging and for relaxation. This encourages the residents to escape the intensity of nearby Canary Wharf in order to appreciate their own private slice of nature high up in the sky.

https://landmarkpinnacle.com/

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Pantheon Estate, Mykonos by Nikos Adrianopoulos

example organic interiors

A renovation by architect Nikos Adrianopoulos of a residence in Mykonos, Greece, transformed an existing villa into a luxury abode with subtle influences from both organic interior design and nature-inspired biophilic design.

Built upon a cliff, the villa has impressive views of the old city harbor and the Aegean Sea. Essential to its design process was the unification of internal and external space. Large outdoor areas accompany the indoors encouraging movement from each space.

The outdoor areas have natural views of the landscape from a sky porch with no railings ensuring not to block the breathtaking views of the area. Accompanying this, biophilic design in the exteriors ensures a smooth transition between the building and its surrounding landscape. Curvilinear furniture such as chairs, large couches, and tables are placed purposefully, making use of premium fabrics, a minimalist colour palette and textured patterns.

The view from an organically shaped pool provides picture perfect views of the sea on the horizon while an outdoor gym provides a complete set of workout equipment such as a squat rack,weights and cardio machines. Stone walls, wooden floors, and a transparent plant-based ceiling that lets small slices of light into the gym's training floor.

Moving indoors, the interior design is a harmonious selection of neutral colors - tans, whites, browns, beiges, and blacks. Curvilinear architecture brings nature’s mark inside through arches and curved organically falling countertops.

Examples of biophilic interior design are present in the woven light fixtures, stone sinks, and stone tile. One of the key elements of design within the space was created from the bare rock that the structure was built upon through open rock walls. Bare rock walls are exposed within the sunroom and bathroom, among other spaces.

Painted white bare rock walls create a wonderful natural space within a shower and sauna. Bringing nature further within the walls quarters, wood beams expand across many of the villa ceilings. The space is adorned with artwork of driftwood and curvilinear, undefined sculpture work. This renovation transformed the space into an interconnected body with its natural environment.

https://www.nikosadrianopoulos.com/projects/pantheon-residence-mykonos

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The Eden, Singapore

example of multi-family residential biophilic architecture

The Eden is a private residential building located in Singapore designed by Heatherwick Studio.

From its exterior facade the key principle of biophilic design in building architecture is hard to miss - a cascading central spine of flora created by a series of balcony gardens.

Each apartment is one floor of the building fitted with its own ‘eco-balcony’.

Clam shaped in structure, they each hold sufficient soil for over 20 different species of plant life to thrive in the humid Singaporean climate.

Each sky garden is alternated giving double the height to the outdoor space.

The garden above provides a necessary shade from the hot Singapore sun and a view of plant life hanging down from above. Walking out into these spaces is like walking into your own personal jungle.

Each apartment taking an entire floor also creates opportunities for natural cross ventilation, a low-energy and altogether more pleasant experience than 24/7 air conditioning, at least as an option should owners want it!

The entire ground floor is a heavily planted garden with nooks for relaxation. The pool is lined with an array of flora to one side. Walking into the lobby with 18 meter high ceilings, plant ‘chandeliers’ hang from above helping to decorate the room but creating moments of visual intrigue and wonder too.

https://www.heatherwick.com/projects/buildings/eden/

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Casa Cerros Madrid

example of single family residential biophilic architecture

Located in the hills of Madrid, the Casa Cerros estate was renovated into a. sustainable villa with subtle traces of biophilic design that uses compact space to its maximum potential.

Located in what can be a cool climate, the villa was constructed to amplify heat and sunlight.

With a narrow south facing facade, the team at sustainable architecture studio SLOW in Barcelona had to effectively use the space to pull in as much natural light as possible.

This was executed by lifting the roof creating room for the addition of skylights and additional openings to the south through biophilic design architecture.

Amplifying the introduction of light and solar heat into the south side of the building also affected the placement of rooms within the home.

On the lighter south facing side, the most used spaces were constructed including the living room, dining room, and kitchen.

Within the North facing side of the building, the bathrooms, office, and machine room are housed. Double brick walls with insulation in between allow for heat conservation while also allowing for open brick accent walls with texture of thickness and grooves.

The residents particularly requested a fireplace so a thermo stove was installed to further conserve heat. When the fireplace is running it heats the hot water tank and heating system.

The whole building is unified through a cabin like aesthetic with a large incorporation of wooden walls, ceiling, and furniture. The villa acts as a compact, warm, rustic yet nature-inspired space for a family to enjoy the comfort of home without losing contact with the environment around them.

https://www.slowstudio.es/arquitectura/casa-cerros-madrid

Benefits of Biophilic Design on Cognitive Performance in the workplace

HERO natural foods, Swiss headquarters - biophilic design by Biofilico

Firstly, what is biophilic design anyway?

Biophilic design is a way to integrate nature into the built environment, at building and interiors level. By combining elements of both sustainability and wellbeing, biophilic design is aligned with People and Planet, with green building standards as well as healthy building standards.

By bringing the outside world in, we can create spaces that are aligned with our evolutionary past, while respecting and protecting the environment and promoting human health and happiness.

Biophilic design in offices

Utilizing biophilic design in office and working environments can have tangible benefits on the mental wellbeing of all personnel by increasing productivity, creativity and overall morale. The basic idea of biophilic design centers around the physical, emotional, and cognitive wellbeing benefits of multi-sensory connections with nature.

The main idea behind bringing biophilic design into an indoor environment, (whether it be work or residential) is applying architectural and interior concepts that recall or reflect the natural world. This design strategy brings us in touch with human biology and our deep connection to nature that is often neglected in dense urban contexts today.

leveraging The elements in biophilic design - light

One possible interpretation of this concept when designing a biophilic design space comes from harnessing the four elements: fire, earth, air and water. (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6491965/#B69 )

The idea of using fire can be seen through UV light and heat therapy. The right amount of lighting can help align the body’s circadian rhythm by mediating shifts in light exposure that modify duration of nocturnal melatonin production (the hormone that promotes sleep).

This is important because by pushing melatonin production to sleeping hours, people are more awake and energized throughout the day. Light exposure also has important implications for serotonin production: the happy hormone.

Activation of serotonergic neurons helps regulate brain development and function. Irregularities in these neurons are associated with many psychiatric disorders (such as depression and anxiety) that are often seen developing amongst individuals working typical 9-5 jobs. (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6405415/ )

A general increase in alertness can be attributed to a light source that mimics the sun because of the hormonal production it promotes in the brain so for environments where performance and efficiency are required, it would be of use to have lighting that most resembles nature and can support these biological processes. 

leveraging The elements in biophilic design - plants & earth

The next element, earth, really relies on innate biological processes and connecting us to nature. Getting people away from urbanized workspaces by including plants, natural lighting and other natural elements has been proven to increase positive feelings, manage heart rate and control stress.

Forest bathing is a practice of “taking in the forest” to inspire a reconnection to the earth (see our article on this subject here). Practices like forest bathing that involve multi-sensory immersion in deep nature have been shown to significantly increase scores of positive feelings while significantly decreasing scores of negative feelings after stimuli compared with the urban stimuli. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0033350610003203 ).

Also, heart rate analysis indicated that the forest environment significantly increased parasympathetic (restores body’s sense of calm) nervous activity and significantly suppressed sympathetic (activates fight or flight) activity of participants compared with the urban environment.

Alongside this decrease of nervous energy throughout the body there is an important decrease in cortisol levels. Cortisol is a hormone that plays an important role in; helping respond to stress, fighting infection, regulating blood sugar, maintaining blood pressure, regulating metabolism.

Elevated cortisol levels are associated with less perceived control which means, more difficulty paying attention to the task at hand. Hypothesized disturbance in circadian rhythm (relating to cortisol production) needs further investigation but is linked to a change. (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8882096/ ). 

Air goes along with the idea of using plants in a working environment because of the clean air benefits they provide. The importance of this element relies on a lack of pollution in the surrounding environment (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13181-011-0203-1 ).

Emerging preclinical evidence suggests that air pollution may induce oxidative stress, neuroinflammation, microglial activation, and cerebrovascular dysfunction, while potentially altering the blood–brain barrier.

Oxidative stress (https://www.healthline.com/health/oxidative-stress#:~:text=Oxidative%20stress%20is%20an%20imbalance,easily%20react%20with%20other%20molecules. ) is an imbalance between free radicals and antioxidants that can have a chain reaction in the body. This can cause large chemical reactions in your body that can either be beneficial of harmful.

Neuroinflammation refers to the process of the brain’s immune system response. This is important to keep in check because too much inflammation, like among most things, means brain disease.

Microglia are the macrophages of the central nervous system that play a keep role in brain development so microglial activation are important in coordinating “a plan of attack” when disease is sensed in the brain. But if this are activated when not needed, they can potentially cause more harm than good. 

Cerebrovascular dysfunction just refers to insufficiencies of blood supply to the brain that result in a multitude of issues. The importance of having fresh, clean air helps to prevent from many diseases and can be utilized in a working environment with the inclusion of plants or air filters or things alike. 

leveraging The elements in biophilic design - water

The last element, water, is one that can prove a little more difficult to incorporate into an everyday workspace. The main therapies involving water are things like hydrotherapy and balneotherapy. Hydrotherapy is just using water in any form as a form of noninvasive treatment while balneotherapy is the practice of bathing in minerals and other additives and is used more particularly in spas and pools for arthritis support.

Hydrotherapy reduces pain/stress through easing muscle tension with water support and also promoting the release of endorphins. (https://connecthealth.org.au/enews/why-water-works-4-hydrotherapy-health-benefits/#:~:text=Warm%20water%20hydrotherapy%20has%20been,to%20further%20reduce%20muscle%20soreness ) Endorphins are the hormones released when your body feels pain or stress.

They act as messengers from the brain to the rest of the body to let it know something isn’t right and to reduce pain, relieve stress therefore, improving mood. Hydrotherapy also helps boost immunity by increasing circulation of white blood cells that allows lymph (immune system fluid that helps get rid of waste) to better work and move around body.

While not all office spaces are equipped to have saunas or pools clearly(!), having water accessible in an office yields similar results. (https://solaramentalhealth.com/can-drinking-enough-water-help-my-depression-and-anxiety/#:~:text=Water%20has%20been%20shown%20to,can%20create%20feelings%20of%20relaxation. )

Not only is it important to provide employees with a drinkable water source for hydration, it may also be of use to implement water features within the interior design of a workplace too. (https://www.workdesign.com/2012/12/pros-and-cons-of-workplace-water-features/ )

The steady movement of a water feature provides for a natural and calming sound source as well as a soothing visual that keeps people in tune with nature. The flow of water can also help to mask the noise of a busy office environment while providing visual respite from screens.

Something such as a water fountain or a water cooler often becomes a place of interaction among workers and can increase personal relationships through the act of gathering. Something important to keep in mind, however, is that water features could be distracting for some because of the same beneficial reasons laid out above: too noisy, easy to stare at for hours or prompting people to gather and chat rather than work.

The benefits of water in an office space go far passed the obvious necessities and can spark an important conversation about how to incorporate this element to improve employee performance.

One of the most important concepts when creating an optimal working environment is connecting back to nature. An easy way to do this can be through using techniques outlined by the four elements: fire, earth, air and water.

Further reading:

• Benefits of healthy coworking offices

Best Examples of Biophilic Design Office: Sustainable Interior — Biofilico Wellness Interiors

best examples of Biophilic design in offices

Benefits of biophilia in a sustainable office interior

Biophilia is deep rooted within the human consciousness. A positive psychological affiliation with nature is a key element of human happiness that is all too often neglected in buildings and interiors today but the recent boom in biophilic design, sustainable interiorswellbeing design is redressing the situation.

Biophilic design elements can have a positive impact on employees’ physical and mental health. Incorporating biophilic design into the office environment can significantly enhance employee well-being and productivity. The use of natural elements, natural lighting, and greenery improves air quality, reduces stress, boosts happiness, and increases relaxation, ultimately leading to higher levels of productivity and job satisfaction.

When designing an office space or workspace, from our perspective as biophilic design consultants it is fundamental to create an interior in which occupant wellbeing is maximized while also minimizing environmental impact - a magic combination made possible by biophilic design.

Why is this important? The best office designs provide a way to increase employee happiness and productivity, reduce anxiety in the workplace and attract then retain top talent while respecting the planet around us - it should not be ‘people first, planet later’, or vice versa.

Here we review some recently completed or soon-to-be-completed examples of biophilic design and sustainable interior design offices from around the world that have caught our attention for their aesthetics, creativity and evidence-based approach that pushes the boundaries well beyond a plant wall and some desk plants…! Read on for more office design ideas.

• Citibank Wealth Management offices, Singapore

• Shui On WorkX,* Shanghai by M Moser & Associates*

• Welcome, Milano* by Kengo Kuma Architects for real estate developer Europa Risorse*

• Fosbury & Sons Harmony Coworking, Antwerp, Belgium

• Uncommon Coworking Holborn, London, UK

• Andyrahman Architect Office, East Java, Indonesia

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CitiBank Wealth Hub, Private Wealth Management Offices, Singapore

Designed by Singapore-based Ministry of Design, the increasingly famous biophilic interior designers, the CitiBank Wealth Hub looks more akin to a Silicon Valley tech giant’s headquarters than a banking space… but then this is Singapore, the garden city, and CitiBank clearly wanted to make a statement.

The result is a rare blend of banking and biophilia, with dense indoor landscaping that breaks up the double-height loft-like space with expansive views of the city skyline and abundant natural light to keep the indoor forest flourishing.

Rather than creating internal walls, the main space is peppered with separate meeting pods for one-on-one client meetings, each surrounded by an individual soil bed packed with lush foliage that both purifies the air and provides additional privacy, whilst also helping to boost mood and reduce anxiety. For more on the benefits of biophilia, see here.

A deliberately sumptuous range of materials choices from reception through to the ‘feature’ bar’ and office areas ensures that the private banking clients feel at ease. We see plenty of prestigious marbles, wood cladding, ergonomic furniture, subtle overhead lighting and yet more indoor planter boxes loaded with greenery.

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Shui On WorkX - biophilic offices by M Moser associates, Shanghai

As you walk through the front doors of the Shui On WorkX realistate office located in Shanghai, the presence of biophilia is immediately prominent.

Plants line a welcoming corridor and the large design of a sun illuminates an otherwise drab sidewalk.

Biophilic design fills each and every corner of the large building located deep within the industrialized, busy urban environment of Shanghai.

The reception protrudes down from the ceiling with diverse plants falling from a curvilinear, organic form. Living walls are incorporated to bring nature into the workspace, enhancing well-being and encouraging interaction among employees.

A natural color scheme fills each room with a pallet of greens, tan-browns, and stone-grays. It’s illuminated by walls of large windows filling the space with natural light. This light gives the vegetation a perfect place to flourish. The office is not only lined with small house plants, but entire living trees and moss floors.

Biophilic interior design elements embellish the office with leaf shaped lamps, stump shaped stools, large boulders, and a digital waterfall cascading down from a high ceiling. The elements of nature are brought into the interior space with sophistication and intention creating a masterful, biophilic space.

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Welcome, Milano by kengo kuma associates - the biophilic office of the future

We have watched the development of this ambitious biophilic office park development by the Milano-based real estate developer Seagreen with great interest, not just for its commitment to nature but also for the role of the lead architects, Kengo Kuma Associates, without doubt one of the most consistently impressive design firms in operation today and increasingly famous sustainable interior designers. This project aims to seamlessly integrate the natural world into the built environment, creating a harmonious and sustainable office space.

Made up of 43,500m2 of healthybiophilic offices, 2700m2 of co-working space, 1100m2 of meeting spaces, 2000m2 of food & beverage spaces and 1800m2 of commercial spaces, it looks set to make a tangible impact on Milano’s office landscape.

Solar panels on the rooftop, pocket parks and open-air courtyards, terrace greenery and a 360m2 bioclimatic greenhouse will all ensure a constant connection between the office-worker and nature within the built environment.

Where the Welcome project truly distinguishes itself is in making the connection between biophilia, sustainability and real estate ESG objectives - it may seem obvious but a building that goes out of its way to integrate nature through its architecture and interiors, only to harm nature by using materials that harm the planet in their extraction, manufacturing or transportation to the site would make very little sense at all.

As such, the project espouses both ‘organic architecture’ and people-centric design.

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Biophilic interiors with natural elements at Fosbury & Sons Harmony Coworking, Antwerp, Belgium

In Antwerp, Belgium, a modernist cathedral was stripped down to its concrete bones and rebirthed into what we believe to be an aesthetic marvel of an office that displays subtle influences from the world of biophilic design.

Is it 100%, declaredly nature-inspired? Probably not but it perhaps represents how such organic interior design cues have become a part of our interior design canon in recent years.

Towering six meter high windows line the building illuminating the main, open workspace. Outside of these windows, there is a natural view of King Albert Park - in green and healthy building standards such as the WELL certification and LEED green building standard such views onto nature are rewarded with credits in the final scorecard for their restorative powers on potentially anxious, stressed out office workers.

Areas designed for different settings of productivity, relaxation, and collaboration are incorporated to make the space a healthy office design that is versatile for its patrons. Most furniture is wooden and wooden artworks suspended from the ceiling bring natural elements into the space, helping to frame the experience from floor to ceiling.

The use of natural materials, including sustainable wood and indoor plant walls, further enhances the biophilic design of the Fosbury & Sons Harmony Coworking space.

A large amount of the furniture is vintage making it inherently sustainable. Biophilic elements such as lush greenery, oval shaped windows, and leafless branches adorn the environment.

Overall this a prime example of how an existing building can be diligently restored and converted into a design-oriented coworking environment that gently, almost imperceptibly brings the outdoor space in to create a calm, uplifting environment for productivity. Chapeaux Fosbury & Sons!

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Biophilia at Uncommon Coworking Holborn, London, UK

Uncommon adopted biophilic design into their DNA early on and have consistently delivered interior spaces that overflow with organic design details and living plants - their forthcoming site in central London’s Holborn district looks set to push the boundaries even further in that direction.

We previously interviewed Uncommon’s CEO for our Green & Healthy Places podcast -listen to that episode here.

Scheduled to open in 2023. Located just outside the city bustle of London, the center is sustainably designed for its members to work and thrive within.

The green building, sustainable design has declared three main objectives: Reduce their emissions, achieve net zero, and be carbon negative.

If these objectives are achieved, the coworking space would be one of the first of its kind to achieve a positive environmental impact.

The execution of these plans to realistically obtain their goals is a holistic strategy of the reduction of waste, use, and purchase. Waste reduction includes proper and safe disposal alongside the maximization of reuse and recycling. Use reduction will be executed through regulated energy and water usage.

Finally, purchase reduction will be minimized through expending fewer consumables and purchasing sustainable consumables to ensure a reduction of single use items.

The Holborn coworking environment will be a biophillic space filled with an abundance of plants from floor to ceiling that is created with organic, environmentally friendly materials, and filled with sustainable items. It is the sustainable, biophillic coworking space of the future. The biophilic design also aims to improve air quality by purifying the air, reducing indoor pollutants, and controlling humidity, which contributes to better physical health and mental well-being for its members.

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Andyrahman Architect Office, Indonesia - an example of biophilic office design

In Sidoarjo, Indonesia an architecture office was created with the wellness of their employees as the top priority. The biophilic office design was brought to life with nature around every corner.

The Andyrahman Architect Office also features green walls, adding a dynamic and inviting element to the workspace.

A living garden filled with plants ranging from grasses to hard wood trees is centered within the first floor of the structure creating a view of greenery for all.

Alongside this, a koi pond gurgles with the natural sounds of flowing water. On the second floor of the building resides a movable, breathing wall.

Using a local weaving technique, the bamboo walls allows for the transparency of light and air. It can be opened completely to the outside world.

This truly biophilic office gives workers nooks of relaxation and community such as the rooftop social area for employees to engage in conversation and relaxation in the open air.

Summary

Through these diverse examples of office biophilic design, we can see the tangible aspects of biophilia at work, visually, but we have also tried to highlight the intangible psycho-emotional responses these environments evoke in building occupants. the intangible is paramount.

The nature of biophillic office design is founded within the happiness and wellbeing of those who spend time there, while also respecting the environment with sustainable materials. Ultimately, such tangible connections with nature boost quality of life and work.

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Further Reading

• healthy coworking offices

• home office desk and ergonomic furniture

• What Are Sustainable Office Buildings?

• The Best New Green & Healthy Office Buildings In Barcelona, Spain

• Sustainability Strategy & Sustainable Design Consultants

• Sustainable Office Space - Make Your Office More Eco-Friendly

• What Are The Benefits Of Healthy Coworking Space Designs?

• Coworking Space Design - A Secret To Productive Coworking Space

• A Guide To Biophilic Design In Offices & Coworking Spaces

• Posts Tagged Sustainable Design

• Biophilic Design For People, Planet And Profit

• Benefits Of Biophilic Design On Cognitive Performance In The Workplace

• Nature In The Office Workplace

• Benefits Of Biophilic Design - Why Is It Good For You?

• Free E-Book: Benefits Of Biophilic Design In Offices & Coworking Spaces

• Becoming A Biophilic Design And Healthy Building Consultant

• An Introduction To Biophilic Design - Nature, Wellbeing And Sustainability

• About Us

• What Are Biophilia And Biophilic Design?

• Biophilic Design In The Well Building Standard

• Best Architecture Studios For Biophilic Design

• 5 Best Examples Of Biophilic Design

• Best Examples Of Biophilic Commercial Developments

• Wellness Interior Design Consultants

• Homepage

• A Guide To Workplace Wellbeing Design

• How To Know If Your Workplace Fits The Wellness Office Concept

• Furniture In Workplace Wellness Interior Design: The Ultimate Guide To Choosing Ergonomic Office Furniture

• Sustainable Design Consultants

• An Introduction To Biophilic Design In Sustainable Buildings

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Wellbeing Gardens and Biophilia with Dr. Lauriane Chalmin-Pui

Welcome to the Green and Healthy Places podcast, in which we explore the themes of wellbeing and sustainability in real estate and interiors today.

I'm your host, Matt Morley, founder of Biofilico healthy buildings and in this episode is episode (50) I'm in the UK talking to Dr. Lauriane Chalmin-Pui, a wellbeing Fellow at the Royal Horticultural Society. The RHS is the UK's leading gardening charity.

Dr. Lauriane Chalmin-Pui completed her PhD at Sheffield University where she conducted research on how domestic gardens can support physical and mental health via exposure to plants and wildlife. So if you're a regular listener to the podcast, you'll see the angle of where our conversation might go connecting gardens with biophilic design in interiors and buildings.

Our discussion covers topics as diverse as

• wellbeing gardens, also known as healing gardens

• planet friendly low environmental impact gardening

• environmental psychology as it relates to gardens

• the emotional, physical, and even social benefits of gardening and generally tending to plants

• the benefits of biophilia for our microbiota via direct exposure to soil and earth

• her forthcoming research publication on the role a garden’s colors and scents can play in creating a positive impact on human health and wellbeing.

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Matt Morley

Thank you so much for being here with us today. I'd really love to start with a an initial question on the concept of environmental horticulture, which is your area of expertise. Could you give us a brief intro to that?

environmental horticulture

Dr. Lauriane Chalmin-Pui

Yeah. Hi, Matt. Thanks a lot for having me. So I'm a postdoctoral fellow at the Royal Horticultural Society under the University of Sheffield. And I'm physically based in Wisley, in the hilltop home of gardening science, and I'm in the environmental horticulture team.

So we're primarily primarily concerned with improving our understanding of the interactions between soil, plants, water, and people. This includes carbon, water and nutrient cycles for both outdoors and indoor plants, and how they're impacted by people, of course, as well as the impacts of gardens and gardening on human health and wellbeing. All of these functions are interconnected. And that's why the word ‘environment’. And of course, as I'm sure you'll know, it's all in the context of accelerated urbanization and land use change the biodiversity and climate crises.

We're having more frequent extremes of temperatures and precipitation, which then has the knock on effects on climate on the hydrological cycle and biodiversity on soil health. And our environmental horticulture team is composed of different specialists in these areas.

So we've got horticultural scientists, the soil and climate change scientist, water scientist and fellows like me on tree traits and ecosystem services, for example, in sustainability, of course, research technicians as well. So our primary question in all of that is about the practical interventions that gardeners can apply to reduce their gardening footprint and then also improve environmental health and human wellbeing.

Biophilic design

Matt Morley

It strikes me that there's a parallel between the work you're doing, which is very much academically driven around these outdoor spaces, and biophilic design - some of the principles that apply to my world in terms of creating greener and healthier buildings, where we're constantly balancing those twin demands around our impact on the environment, and the potential positive or indeed negative impacts on the occupants of a building.

You mentioned, climate change. I know it's not perhaps your first specialism but just give us a very broad intro to sustainable gardening, how can gardening be anything but sustainable?

Sustainable gardens

Dr. Lauriane Chalmin-Pui

Right, so I think in terms of a garden sustainability is very much about environmental resilience, whether that's indoors or outdoors. And there's many ways in which we can actually have a negative footprint, if you will. So if you're using peat based compost, for example, that is depleting peat bogs, which are a very important ecosystem and also a carbon store. So it really depends on the practices. And there are so many different ways of garden gardening.

When we think about surface area, we might think that oh, domestic gardens, for example, are quite small and won't necessarily have a big impact. But residential gardens comprise about 30% of Great Britain's total urban area while the total area of UK domestic gardens is about 700,000 hectares, which is equivalent to more than 90,000 football pitches. So it's quite a large area.

Carbon sequestering trees

One positive thing for example a gardener can do is to plant a tree, in their garden or community or school or wherever. And if every gardener did that we would be storing huge amounts of carbon. But one further thing to think about when we think about environmental horticulture, again, is that we shouldn't necessarily just plant a certain tree because it's sequester is more carbon, because we would loose diversity if we planted the same tree. And the goals of a garden are different for example, the goals of a woodland or an agricultural patch.

We're operating on different timescales. So in a timber woodland, you might want to plant a tree that sequesters more carbon in that shorter timescale before it gets cut down. But in a garden, you're probably not anticipating to cut down your tree within the next 10 years. So you might want to choose a tree that encourages that slow growth and sequester carbon over time and storing it in the tree.

Water efficiency for sustainability

Then there are water practices. So whether you are irrigating your garden from mains water will be very different to if you are harvesting rainwater, creating permeable as much permeable surface area and just different practices of how you water, how you feed your soil. There's definitely lots of scope that any gardener can do in their home and for us at the RHS how we can influence the horticultural industry, the government and how we can promote these different, more sustainable behaviors. And then, of course, we have our own gardens that, you know, we have our own operations that are going in here. So we're also trying to improve that.

sustainable green buildings

Matt Morley

Great, okay, so you've brought up a couple of things there. I think the one point that just occurred to me as I was listening to you is very much same principles, when we look at, say, putting in a green roof on a, on a building as part of a sustainable real estate plan.

You know, we're trying to achieve many of the same outputs that you've you've just described and also deal with many of the same issues around for example, irrigation and how rainwater collection can just effectively reduce overall water consumption and lower irrigation systems and shear escaping and things like that.

wellbeing gardens

You mentioned the RHS and its role so for those who are perhaps not familiar with it, or anyone listening from outside of the UK, we're Royal Horticultural Society, what is the overall aim you're obviously specialists in Wellbeing within the health and planetary aspect of the Environmental Horticulture team, but the RHS itself? How does your team fit into the wider picture? And what are the aims and objectives of your teamwork over the course of a year?

Dr. Lauriane Chalmin-Pui

Right. So the Royal Horticultural Society is the UK is largest gardening charity. And so it's, it's all about that horticultural knowledge. So we have an advisory service members can call in and ask questions. It's about inspiring people to, you know, do the best and their guidance. And it's about promoting that horticultural industry as well. And within our team, it's very much the science so the evidence base for this for for all of this the different initiatives, we've also got a community outreach team, for example, who work in areas that may not have that safe and quality access to green spaces.

planet friendly gardening

One of the campaigns at the moment is a planet friendly gardening campaign. So this is exactly the kinds of things that we're talking about. And the aim of that is to help gardeners make the most of the physical and emotional benefits of gardening both for the planet And for ourselves? What was the next part of your question?

healing gardens

Matt Morley

So you mentioned? Well, you, you've just tied them both in next you mentioned the emotional benefits of gardening. And you also mentioned that the IHS had been working on some of his own gardens. And doing some research for our conversation, I saw that I think it was four of these sort of health and wellbeing gardens going up. So let's dig into that a little bit. So the emotional benefits from your evidence based perspective, like, how do you quantify those? How do you provide evidence for them? And what are the sort of broad buckets in terms of those emotional benefits? We're presumably talking more about mental health and well being?

biophilia for mental wellbeing

Dr. Lauriane Chalmin-Pui

Yes, so there is a wealth of evidence on the mental, but also the physical and the social health benefits of gardens and gardening. And this is it's a relatively new field in science, it started picking up in the 80s in the field of environmental psychology. So there is an and it's been growing ever since. And I think the COVID pandemic, one thing that it has alerted us, other than, of course, you know, medical infections, is the importance of green spaces.

Biophilia research

So I think it's really picked up. Most people now understand this, if you tell them about the mental health impacts of a garden, they're not going to look at you like you're crazy. So I think that it's really been building but in the 80s, one of the first studies was by an environmental psychologist called Roger Ulrich, and he had a sort of natural experiment where he was looking at patients recovering from gallbladder surgery.

In the hospital, one wing of the hospital had a view of trees, the other wing of the hospital, the windows had a view of a brick wall, and other buildings. And he saw that the people who were having rooms with a view of the trees were recovering a couple of days faster and being discharged a couple of days earlier than the patients with the view of the brick wall. They were requiring less painkillers, and they were less grumpy with the nurses. So that that was the real seminal studies.

Since then, there have been theories that have been proposed. So the likes of attention restoration theory by Stephen and Rachel Kaplan stress reduction theory which was developed by the same Roger Ulrich. And I started this research with my PhD in 2016. And really, in these past five, six years, it's it's really grown a lot to the wealth of evidence on mental physical and social health.

So for example, the things we can really look at are symptoms of depression, anxiety, so that's been shown to be reduced with gardening. There you can also look at pleasant and unpleasant emotions and the frequency of them. You can look at mental health during the COVID lockdowns for example, they've been quite extreme scenarios, but quite common scenarios now for many of us, we can look at general scales of well being we can look at reported stress, feminine.

Physiological benefits of biophilia

So that's a self reported psychological perspective. But we can also look at physiological stress regulation. So one of my studies, for example, looked at cortisol, which is the body's main stress hormone. And I found that the presence of plants and small front gardens did actually have an impact on the residents cortisol patterns on the daily basis.

So there's all sorts of things you can there's also in terms of physical health, you can look at positive habits forming around diets and physical exercise, there have been studies showing that greener spaces are more likely to encourage active travel, so such as walking and bicycling, for example.

Green exercise in the garden

Gardening regularly also has been shown to reduce the risk of fracture. So like limb fractures, and it's it's an adaptive form of physical exercise. So as one grows older, and perhaps physical abilities change, it is an activity that one can keep up with, as opposed to maybe running that is not as adaptive. And we're learning more and more about the importance of exposure to microbial diversity. So that's through soil and vegetation, small microbiota, very small organisms that are found on the skin and in our gut depending on what we eat, and that will have a knock on impact on our immune system.

social health benefits from gardening

Finally, social health, which does often get forgotten is linked to things like a sense of community, a sense of belonging in one's area, making friends, feeling feeling connected with the world around us. And that will have a knock on impact on our sense of self esteem and creativity and having, you know, a kind of meaningful occupation to do. So there's, there's lots of things, really, and it's only growing. Of course, each of these studies are done in particular context of particular populations. So there's always more to do.

Biophilic design research studies

Matt Morley

The thank you for that. It's, it's so interesting to see the crossover, you know, that Ulrich study, which I think was in sort of the early 80s. And not that much seems to have been done since then, if I'm honest, we all go back to that one study of X number of patients in a hospital room, but even in the biophilic design space, it's really the seminal piece that we all refer to, and then again, into the sort of the ATR and that are SRT studies, or concepts and theories biophilic design.

What I'm seeing is that it has much more of a passive component, I think what's coming through from what you've just said, is there's this active piece. And I think the key word, there might be gardening, rather than just exposure to plants in nature.

So I often think about that in terms of forest bathing, where there is an element of engagement with nature. And I think with gardening, you're taking it a level further, because you're then prompting exposure to the plants and therefore tapping into that sort of immune health microbiota. And then that social peace around community and engagement is immediately suggesting that perhaps a like a rooftop garden in a residential building, for example, or an office even would have far more or perhaps a wider application in terms of the physical benefits than just bumping up the number of air purifying plants in reception, for example, I think that's, it's a really striking piece of of, of insight that perhaps biophilic design, yeah, maybe struggled to get to, because it tends to be more about introducing these elements into a space and then accepting that people will just sort of passively take in their surroundings and, and hope for the best gardening is much more about engaging with the garden and, and playing an active role in it clearly, that's the main difference. Right?

Dr. Lauriane Chalmin-Pui

Right. So there's two, the active and the passive engagement of the plants, you're absolutely right to, to draw those two as key differences. And of course, when you are gardening, you do have that added element of creativity of being able to shape the environment that's around you, which psychologically is very linked to to, to a feeling of control. And when we look at how that might be impacting, I mean, often a lot of the ills that we have, are often around uncertainty and lack of control.

So when someone can control something that will usually have quite a lot of benefits. However, I do disagree with you, but the more passive exposure to plants doesn't have much impact. And that is kind of negligible because there are more and more studies, including one of my own, that, even just that that passive exposure of having something nearby so whether that's in an office or in a home or just outside of the home, that very frequent access does have an impact on perceived stress on perceived well being but also on this cortisol patterns, which I mentioned earlier.

So I did a study that we we found the whole street, that garden, they had front gardens, so that the physical space between the House and the street or front yards if you're in North America, that were previously paved over and so I did an intervention where I added plants to them. And I studied the residents there of over the course of a year. And we found that before the interventions only intervention only 24% of the residents had this healthy diurnal cortisol pattern. So it healthy physiological stress regulation, and then after we added the plants this increase to 53%, suggesting that those individuals had better physiological stress regulation in their bodies, which probably had a link to their mental health.

Matt Morley

That was your four year research project with the University of Sheffield. Is that the one Yes,

Dr. Lauriane Chalmin-Pui

most of those people were not actively taking care of. So they were to planters, with some ornamental plants in them. They were self watering containers. So that was a store of water underneath. So the participants barely even had to watch them. It was in Salford, where it rains a lot. Though for the vast majority of these people, there was no real active gardening engagement, but they still got those benefits.

Matt Morley

And you went with ornamental plants. Is that so what were the specifics of that we're looking for color. Do you think what you obviously went for what you would imagine would create the most positive benefits? Right? So is that about aesthetics? Is it about painting the rainbow with the flowers and the plants that are out there? Or what suggestions would you have in terms of trying to bring a little bit of that in?

Dr. Lauriane Chalmin-Pui

Sure. So interestingly, in that experiment, I didn't go for what I thought would have the most benefits, I wanted to isolate as many factors as possible. So when you're doing a science experiment, I didn't want to kind of conflict I didn't want to put food for example, because then it could be argued that the people were having a higher well being because they were deriving other benefits, maybe having a cheaper food bill, if they were getting some harvests from it. I didn't want to go for anything to aromatic that might, you know, lift up spirits in other ways. I wanted to go for something not too exotic either, that would provide a huge novelty factor.

For example, I wanted to go with plants that are quite normal. So all found in regular garden centers and quite familiar to people. So we had a mix of some bedding plants, some shrubs and climbers. And the focus also was of course, the climatic conditions of of Salford, but something that was easy to know, maintenance and that self watering container. But yeah, I mean, we did go for something.

So we went for a kind of purple palette we had asked for. We had asked the residents beforehand if they had anything they particularly didn't want. But then beyond that, they were happy to go with anything. So they were Viola's petunias as alias clematis, then spring bulbs, so daffodils, snowdrops and practices. Yeah, so So quite a quite a familiar range of plants.

Matt Morley

And I know you recently were involved in the health and horticulture conference 2022, and your particular presentation, there was around research and community. So with those two, research a community, the city and the street. So were you there talking about that subject? And have you evolved or thinking since the end of the research projects? What were the sort of key messages you were communicating there to the audience?

Dr. Lauriane Chalmin-Pui

Yeah, so the RHS, health and horticulture conference that was on the 17th and 18th of March was very much part of my own research agenda. Were going beyond the actual logistics of the research itself, we really do want to play that role in bringing people together. So one of the things we've found is that the horticulture industry itself doesn't necessarily fully recognize these health and wellbeing impacts and the evidence base for it.

And the health and social care sector as wide as I can cast that net doesn't necessarily have the skills and understandings to really have that Win Win effect. And then of course, around and associated that to that you've got professionals in urban planning and in the built environment, like yourself, and, and there's so much more.

So really, what we wanted to do was bring people together and share that knowledge and my own talk as as part of that was, yeah, so titled, research and community and that was really to tie in the importance of people in the development and the application of that research.

So how can we achieve the integration between science and and I mean, to call it outreach, but knowledge dissemination and sharing, and what I meant by the city and the street level, was because it refers to the scale at which physical, mental and social health often operate for individuals and for communities, especially when we're thinking about green and cultivated spaces and domestic gardens.

So for the average individual, their well being will be based on you know, to a certain extent their genetics and their lifestyle and things like that. Of course their family their Friends, but then in terms of a spatial scale, it will be the city and the street, their home, their workplace, their school.

And it the aim of the conference all together is to improve the recognition of gardens and gardening as that as a valuable public health asset and as a resource that can contribute to promoting better health for everyone, but also reducing that incidence of poor health that are generally well seemingly well population as well as for specific groups of people who might need more targeted interventions or more specific support to access safe green spaces.

Matt Morley

And from the outputs of the conference, and but also based on your own knowledge. When one thinks of, say, healing gardens in cancer care homes, for example, like in the Maggie's care centers, where they create gardens that are intended to be spaces for cancer patients to on some emotional level to heal. Is there a is there a playbook emerging in terms of the way to maximize the space to get the most out of it from a scientific perspective, in terms of those mental well being benefit mental and physical? Benefits? Are there key principles that are starting to become clear? Or is that still a work in progress?

Dr. Lauriane Chalmin-Pui

From the design element, I'd really recommend the work and the book of Claire Cooper Marcus, who has looked at therapeutic garden design, and she has based a lot of her findings on post occupancy evaluations. And it's it's really wonderful, she not only looks at the impacts on patients and their visitors, but also quite importantly, on the staff who are working at that hospitals who often do have quite tough frontline jobs.

Again, we've seen that even more with the pandemic. But actually, there's not yet any scientific evidence base. So I have a PhD student who's just been citing out doing a scoping review for exactly what you're saying. And looking at the scientific literature, she's not really found much that has any kind of quantitative evaluation of this. So it's all quite qualitative, subject to the designs, of course, in very different contexts, it can be relatively straightforward, I think, to spot a bad design, something that just isn't used by people, you might have a garden space that, you know, has metal benches in a hot climate.

So of course, nobody's going to sit there, that's very easy to pinpoint. But then, in terms of really leveraging and optimizing what we do know, that scientific approach isn't there yet. And that is the case for these kinds of hard features, let's say but also for plants. So the role of scent of color of symmetry, for example. And often in when you're looking at planting design handbooks, there isn't, there's often an approach that's based on choosing the plants for their function for the wider ecosystem. And then the last thing is kind of aesthetics and sensory properties. And of course, all three of them are very important.

But that last point, is generally just completely subjective. And based on personal taste of either the garden designer, or if they've done a sort of consultation, focus group with the with the future and potential users of the place. But there's not. Yeah, there's not yet that scientific approach. So that's what we'd really like to get to one of our goals at the RHS is to create an evidence based blueprint for wellbeing gardens, whether that is in a hospital context or a a residential context, the school context, the prison context, those kind of model to go on that is based on scientific evidence

Environmental Psychology

Matt Morley

which would then be so useful for various other sectors, including my own. That's what's I think, so powerful about the work that you're doing is that it can then be leveraged in other sectors too, because it has this sort of spillover effect. You mentioned. Color and scent. I know you've been doing your own research on that. It may be too early to, to speculate on the outcomes of it, but what's your initial hypothesis in terms of the role of color and scent on stress and well being from a garden context?

Dr. Lauriane Chalmin-Pui

Yeah, so I've started doing some indoor experiments and we'll be doing outdoor ones as well to kind of have a multi pronged approach to understanding this. Essentially, what we've got outdoor for example, in the wizzley RHS Bisley garden in Surrey, we've got a wellbeing garden, which has been designed by Matt Keatley as a living laboratory. So it's got these different features, there is an area of running water for example, there is an area of Stillwater there's an area of plants and flowers that are deeper reds and oranges. And then an area that has more whites, pale pinks, pale yellows.

So the wellbeing garden there is, as I said, not based on any scientific conclusions, but it's based on scientific hypotheses. Um, and then it gives us the space to test them out. So one of the hypotheses for example, is the impact of color on an emotional responses to different colors. So in psychology and marketing, we know for example, that the color red can evoke certain different emotional responses. So be that power or anger or love. And often these kinds of things will be mediated, of course, by cultural and individual idiosyncratic experiences. But there's no research so far on whether those color stimuli, whether they have the same emotional responses when they're in a natural setting in a garden and on a plant.

And so one of the hypotheses following that psychological theory is that the reds and the warmer colors might be more arousing when we when in terms of arousing emotion, so they're the more active emotions, like excitement and invigoration. And anger as well is excited is an arousing emotion. And then when we look at the cooler colors, the whites, the pastels, the blues, whether they would be more calming. And of course, when I think often when we think of a well being garden, or a therapeutic garden, or a healing garden, or whatever you want to call it, I think most people automatically think of relaxation under lower stress.

But actually, that's not necessarily what we need. As humans, we don't want to just be relaxed all the time. And guidance can be a place for us to experience our full range of human emotions. So sometimes we want to be really stimulated. And so that's part of the design and whether that's through color that I've been talking about or a sense. So we know that sense, like rosemary, for example, there have been tests on rosemary essential oil that has increased alertness and cognitive attention.

aromatherapy for wellbeing design

So you know, if you do a little kind of little cognitive tests, people have scored higher when they've had some rosemary essential oil next to them versus without. So there are so many ways in which the planting palettes of a garden can influence and if you've got a space that can be, for example, divided into two areas very crudely, you can have one that is less arousing one one that is more arousing, and depending on how you as an individual are feeling that day, you can go and surround yourself in an environment that suits what you need, what you want, how you're feeling. And that will help you regulate your emotions in a in a healthy way, rather than suppressing anything.

Matt Morley

Well, if you can get to it, that type of insight would help anyone working in the biophilic design field to say create know how to adapt the interiors in a space, for example, in an office environment where perhaps it is more about cognitive performance and alertness and concentration productivity, versus, say a quiet room space within a large office, which was more about the end to that Yang.

So then about calming and restorative, because I think, yeah, we just don't have the scientific base basis for that. I think we're often doing it more on instinct. And I was going to close if I may, by a question on that, Rob, perhaps less instinct more on an angle around evolutionary psychology. I just wondered from your perspective, which is clearly science based.

evolutionary health perspective

Is there any room for an evolutionary psychology approach that says, well, perhaps some of what we're dealing with here is, is about as much as anything our genes, our history, our evolution on the planet in tune and connected with nature? Is there space for that? Or are you looking for hard facts only in the present day?

Dr. Lauriane Chalmin-Pui

Really interesting question. So I think that at the end of the day, we are all the same species with Animals, you know, we have our habitat our habitat is increasingly for, for most people in the world, urban. And I don't personally, I kind of understand the very big dichotomy between urban manmade environments and nature when especially these are often contrasted.

But I think that what's important and what we as a as a kind of modern day human need is, is the balance and the integration of those two things. I think that often there can be a very easy over attribution to these evolutionary arguments, that we are a much more today we are much more mediated by our cultural experiences, whether that is nationality or race or gender, or just just past experiences that we've had as individuals. And I think that for most people, that will probably be the more important when we think about emotional reactions that often will kind of override any evolutionary aspects.

But I think that we certainly at the basic level, yes, we are, we are drawn to nature. But the question is, which kind of nature and and the you know, a tree is something that is very understandably, nature, a virus or pathogen less so. So I think, you know, sometimes we've got to, we've got to really understand what we're talking about. And sometimes it can be over generalized. So. Yeah, I mean, I think there is definitely an importance for that, for that science of understanding what it is, and what reactions are we finding? And the, the argument isn't, it doesn't always just go back to, you know, where did we evolve?

Matt Morley

It think that's critical. It's, it's too much of a, of a, an umbrella concept to just say, well, nature dominates nurture. So it's not about what we've learned, but it's about what we were born with in our DNA, and therefore, Biophilia is, is already proven, and we don't need to back it up. I think it's, we need, we need both, we need an understanding of the science that's proving that it's still present today. And that we are in fact, reacting as perhaps an evolutionary approach might suggest, we need to

Dr. Lauriane Chalmin-Pui

definitely and I think we also need to understand our impact on nature. So things like sustainable practices, environmental, Pro Environmental behavior, things like that. I mean, they may sound quite small in the grand scheme of things, when you look at, you know, the huge tipping points of climate change and things like that. But ultimately, that integration, however much nature there is in your environment, you still depending on the water, you're still depending on the air, you're still depending on climate stability.

And we do need to understand our impacts on that and how it all ties in. And I think that's how just to go full circle back to the kind of Environmental Horticulture it's not. It's not just our well being versus a planetary natural, you know, very Green Planets everywhere. It's really about everything coming together and everything is interlinked and equally important.

Matt Morley

I think we should close on that. That's a big thought to wrap things up with thank you so much. Well, we'll leave a note. We'll leave a mention of the well being garden book by your colleague at the IHS, Professor Griffiths in the show notes, in terms of people connecting, showing support for the RHS, how can they follow along with the work that you're doing that?

Dr. Lauriane Chalmin-Pui

Well, we've got a oh, I can't remember the URL, you might have to link it. But we've got some we've got plenty of pages on our website that has links to all of this well being research. People, of course can contact me directly if there is a specific question or access to a specific paper or study in terms of more generally gardening inspiration for for example, small spaces, things like that.

The rest of the RHS website https://www.rhs.org.uk/ also has plenty of horticultural knowledge that is freely available. You don't have to be in the UK but of course it is probably more biased towards UK plants. And in terms of sustainable gardening practices, again, there's a wealth of tips and advice on the RHS website.

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FURTHER READING:

• World Green Building Council Health Wellbeing Framework

mental Health benefits of biophilic indoor environment in virtual reality - harvard research study

A review of Harvard's research into the wellbeing benefits of a biophilic space experienced through virtual reality

Four virtual reality office layouts. Note: indoor green incorporates green plants, water, natural materials and biomorphic shapes into indoor space; outdoor view incorporates long-distance natural view and daylight into indoor space through windows; combination incorporates biophilic elements from indoor green and outdoor view.

Source: Effects of biophilic indoor environment on stress and anxiety recovery: A between-subjects experiment in virtual reality. Harvard study.

Harvard has delivered two different studies on the wellbeing benefits of exposure to a biophilic space in an online world, the first in 2019 and a follow-up study in 2020, both of which explore the positive impact of biophilic interiors experienced through a virtual reality headset.

A biophilic design consultant perspective

Why is this of interest to us as biophilic design consultants? We already work with a combination of direct biophilia (live plants or a fish tank for example) and indirect biophilia (analogues such as botanical wallpaper or inspirational landscape photos) in our projects as biophilic designers and healthy building experts, utilizing biophilic principles to reconnect urban dwellers with nature. Yet as we enter the age of Web 3.0 and the Metaverse, it is surely pertinent to consider the potential of online, virtual reality worlds that incorporate biophilic design too.

benefits of biophilic design examples in online worlds

In summary, the Harvard studies show that biophilic elements in the online environments experienced by participants did increase physiological stress recovery by lowering blood pressure, heart rate, and anxiety levels in respondents, demonstrating significant physical health benefits, as we might expect by inferring from real-world biophilic design studies.

The implications of this are profound, consider a fast-paced office environment where no natural light or nature views are available, no park or gardens nearby, and no budget available for a complete biophilic interior fit-out of the space but there is scope to create a virtual reality pod for stressed-out staff to relax in when they need a break.

By providing a biophilic virtual world for them to spend time in, we can now predict, thanks to this rigorous Harvard research, to have a tangible impact on stress recovery and anxiety levels.

Interestingly, the study also highlights how certain biophilic design examples were more effective than others for certain types of tasks. For example, window access provides stimulation for creativity but having no window may be better for tasks that require deep concentration.

harvard research into biophilic environments

In the Harvard 2019 VR study - https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/ina.12593 - the methods deployed were as follows:

• 4 types of rooms (3 biophilic, one non biophilia) each repeated in an open and enclosed environment, incorporating green spaces to enhance mental health, productivity, and community bonding

• Natural elements: “visual connection with nature” and “dynamic and diffuse light”

• Green plants, access to natural light and view

• Natural analogues: “biomorphic forms and patterns” and “material connection with nature”

• Products made/looked like natural materials, furniture w/biomorphic shapes

• Combined: combination of both

research results of virtual reality biophilic interior spaces

• Participants in open biophilic spaces had more physiological stress reduction than in enclosed biophilic spaces

• Participants in enclosed biophilic space had higher creativity score increase than in open biophilic spaces

• Increased green exposure = significant decreases in blood pressure

• Natural elements and combination had highest increase in RMSSD (stress relief)

• Biophilic environments increased creativity due to their calming influence

• Window access= better for creativity (more stimulation)

• No window = better for concentration tasks (more attention for task)

• Participants preferred to maximize natural light, having a view, and indoor plants over natural materials (wood) and biomorphic forms

• Participants spent most of their time looking at biophilic elements

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Fig. 2. Experimental procedure. Note: IEQ: indoor environmental quality; BP: blood pressure; STAI: State-Trait Anxiety Inventory; HRV: heart rate variability; SCL: skin conductance level.

Source: Effects of biophilic indoor environment on stress and anxiety recovery: A between-subjects experiment in virtual reality. Harvard.

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Review of the follow-up study into mental health benefits of biophilic environments online

In the Harvard 2020 virtual reality study into the positive impact of biophilic environments in a virtual reality context - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160412019336347 - the methods deployed were as follows:

• 4 rooms made up of a non biophilic space, an indoor green space, a space with an outdoor view onto a natural landscape, and a combination of biophilic interiors and views out onto nature

• Window vs. no window (big difference in office spaces)

• Outdoor view: long distance natural views of trees, grass, water, daylight (windows positioned same place as living walls in indoor green), intangible elements, natural light

• Biophilic tangible elements

• Indoor green: living walls, potted plants, water (fish tank), natural materials/biomorphic shapes, tangible elements

research results of exposure to biophilic environments in virtual reality

• RMSSD (stress relief)

• Non biophilic vs. Indoor green: 2.1% faster indoor green (sig. Better recovery in this environment)

• Heart Rate Levels : throughout recovery pd, biophilic settings caused faster recovery

• 70% of the time in Indoor green people had a complete recovery of heart rate

• 72% of the time in combination people had a complete recovery of heart rate

• General Trends

• Indoor green more physiological stress recovery in the built environment

• Improves participant blood pressure the most (along with all biophilic conditions)

• Outdoor view: more anxiety reduction

• Combination: between the two

• Improved both (2nd best for both)

• Baseline stress conditions were either met or went even lower under biophilic conditions

Design Principles

Biophilic design principles are the foundation of creating spaces that promote well-being and a connection to nature. These principles guide the incorporation of natural elements into interior spaces to create a harmonious and restorative environment. By integrating natural elements such as plants, water features, and natural materials, biophilic design aims to mimic the natural world, fostering a sense of tranquility and balance. These principles not only enhance the aesthetic appeal of a space but also contribute to the physical and mental health of its occupants, making them feel more connected to nature and improving their overall well-being.

Natural Light

Natural light is a fundamental element of biophilic design. It has a profound impact on human health and well-being, influencing our circadian rhythms, mood, and cognitive function. Maximizing natural light in interior spaces can be achieved through various design strategies, such as:

• Orienting buildings to optimize natural light exposure

• Using transparent and translucent materials to filter and diffuse natural light

• Incorporating skylights, clerestory windows, and solar tubes to bring natural light deep into buildings

• Minimizing obstructions and using reflective surfaces to bounce natural light throughout spaces

By prioritizing natural light, biophilic design not only enhances the visual appeal of a space but also supports human health and well-being, creating environments that are both beautiful and beneficial.

Natural Materials

Natural materials are essential in biophilic design, as they provide a tangible connection to the natural world. These materials can be used in various ways, such as:

• Wood: a natural, renewable resource that can be used for flooring, walls, and furniture

• Stone: a durable, natural material that can be used for flooring, walls, and countertops

• Plants: living, breathing organisms that can be used to purify the air, improve acoustics, and enhance aesthetics

• Natural fibers: such as wool, cotton, and hemp, which can be used for upholstery, carpets, and textiles

Incorporating natural materials into interior spaces not only enhances their aesthetic appeal but also promotes a sense of well-being and connection to the natural world.

What are the Benefits of Biophilic Design?

Biophilic design offers several key benefits, enhancing both your mental and physical well-being. By incorporating natural elements into your home, this approach can create a soothing and restful environment.

Now, let's explore how you can implement these benefits with specific design choices.

Improves our mind restoration and productivity

Biophilic design enhances cognitive function by fostering an environment that promotes mental restoration. By incorporating nature-inspired designs, you can create an atmosphere that supports higher levels of creativity, problem-solving, and productivity. This connection to nature not only boosts concentration but also contributes to a sense of calm, allowing for a more balanced and stress-free mindset.

Physical Health Benefits

Besides its effects on mental well-being biophilic designs also affect physical health. Accessing natural light and landscapes has helped patients improve sleeping and reduce symptoms in the treatment of seasonal afflictions. Integrated biophysical elements have become an increasingly prevalent trend in healthcare facilities.

Stress Reduction and Improved Cognitive Function

Biophilic design is capable of dramatically reducing stress levels and promoting mental health. Exposure to the natural world can lead to lower concentrations of cortisol which is a hormone released by stress. Integrated natural elements within an interior environment give individuals the opportunity to engage in visual, tactile or sensory experiences that create a soothing effect. Furthermore, biophilic design is associated with a better cognition and memory. The researchers say green-certified buildings score better on cognitive function tests than buildings with no certification in the U.S.

Connection to Nature in Urban Environments

The biophilicity of architecture has evolved as we move towards urban environments and the biosphere becomes vital in connecting urban and rural communities. Urban areas usually do not have direct access to natural features, however a thoughtful design intervention might bring the advantages of nature into city centres. Public spaces, including parks, rooftop gardens and facade greens, provide a way to experience nature's healing benefits. Urban planners and architects incorporate increasingly biophilic ideas within their designs for sustainable, healthy and attractive cities.

Implementing Biophilic Design

Implementing biophilic design principles requires a thoughtful and intentional approach. Here are some strategies for incorporating biophilic design into interior spaces:

• Conduct a site analysis to identify opportunities for natural light, ventilation, and views

• Incorporate natural materials and elements, such as wood, stone, and plants, into the design

• Use biophilic design elements, such as water features, green walls, and natural art, to create a sense of connection to nature

• Consider the psychological and emotional impact of design decisions on occupants

• Engage with stakeholders and occupants to ensure that the design meets their needs and promotes well-being

By thoughtfully integrating biophilic design principles, we can create interior spaces that not only look beautiful but also support the physical and mental health of their occupants.

The Role of Natural Elements in Biophilic Design

Natural elements play a crucial role in biophilic design, as they provide a tangible connection to the natural world. These elements can be used in various ways, such as:

• Visual connections: providing views of nature, such as windows, skylights, and green roofs

• Non-visual connections: incorporating natural elements, such as plants, water features, and natural materials, into the design

• Tactile connections: incorporating natural elements, such as wood, stone, and plants, into the design to provide a tactile experience

• Auditory connections: incorporating natural sounds, such as water features and birdsong, into the design to create a sense of connection to nature

By incorporating natural elements into interior spaces, biophilic design can promote well-being, reduce stress, and improve physical and mental health. These elements not only enhance the aesthetic appeal of a space but also create environments that are restorative and nurturing, fostering a deeper connection to the natural world.

Best examples biophilic design research — biofilico wellness interiors

What is biophilic design and the biophilia hypothesis?

Urbanization and life in dense city centres brings with it a concomitant risk of a disconnect from nature on one level and a cascade of negative impacts on the environment on another. To counter-balance this trend, biophilic design proposes a realignment of priorities by bringing the outside world back into our urban planning, architecture and interiors.

By integrating both sustainability and wellbeing, green building design and healthy building design concepts, this biophilia hypothesis led strategy offers a bridge between the artificial dichotomy of ‘People’ on one side and ‘Planet’ on the other. Incorporating biophilic design elements, such as natural materials and elements, into these designs can improve air quality, thermal comfort, and water management, contributing to the overall sustainability goals.

On the basis that we cannot act on one without inevitably acting on the other, a nature-centric approach provides a vision of future buildings and interiors that nudges us considerably closer to a state of harmony with nature, as per all of our evolutionary history up until the industrial age.

Why do we need biophilia and natural light in buildings and interiors?

City living often equates to a disconnect between our daily existence and nature, with many of us now spending 80-90% of our lives indoors. Introducing a connection with nature through biophilic design is crucial in urban living, as it integrates natural elements into built environments to enhance human health and well-being.

Whereas once our own health and that of the natural environment we inhabited were inextricably linked, it is all too easy to ignore that dynamic when our days are spent between our home, office, school, gym, restaurants and so on… i.e. indoors most of the time!

Indeed, the disconnect has been more extreme and more damaging than any of us could have foreseen, with climate change being only the most prominent manifestation of this new state of affairs.

Only now are we truly coming to appreciate the positive impact this nature exposure, previously taken for granted, can have on our mental and physical wellbeing, or rather - what happens when we deprive ourselves of it (this is the essence of the biophilia hypothesis)

what are benefits of biophilic design?

The main benefits of biophilic design patterns, from our perspective as healthy building and wellness interior consultants, can be collectively grouped into three main categories, specifically spending time in nature has been shown to:

1. reduce anxiety and stress, lowering blood cortisol levels. Biophilic design has positive effects on human health, promoting healing and restorative benefits.

2. increase cognitive function, concentration and memory. It also significantly impacts mental health, improving well-being and productivity, especially in the workplace.

3. enhance positive mood states, promoting a sense of vitality and purpose.

Evidence-based biophilic design in architecture and interiors simply harnesses these scientifically proven insights to bring nature back into our built environment, inviting the outside world in once more via natural materials, colours, patterns and shapes.

Best examples of biophilic design research studies

1.Biophilic design benefits - reduction in stress and anxiety, improving mental health

• Vegetation can reduce stress, increase healing through stimulation of nature views and accessibility (Bratman).

• Biophilic elements increased physiological stress recovery (lowered blood pressure), reduced anxiety, lowered heart rate (Yin, Dec 2019). Creating a seamless connection between indoor and outdoor spaces can further reduce stress and anxiety by integrating natural elements like water, natural ventilation, and greenery.

• The Stress Reduction Theory (SRT) (Ulrich/ Jimenez) states that stress is reduced in nature due to our natural affinity and comfort with the natural world

• Increased healing/recovery rates due to lower stress (Kaltenegger, ch 13). Views of vegetation has been proven to decrease hospital stay times and increase healing (related to stress/pain levels)

• Exposure to natural light increases a neurotransmitter in the body called serotonin, which increases happiness (Kaltenegger ch. 13)

• Research shows that exposure to the natural world can reduce negative thought and rumination (Bratman)

• Two groups, one walked in nature one on a busy street

• Those in nature: increase in positive thought, decrease in negative thought/rumination (the part of the brain linked to depression), decrease in stress/anxiety

• Biophysical services (if larger scale/parks etc.)

• The physical changes that nature creates causes benefits to humans (ex: if more parks, people may be more encouraged to go on a run near their house and will cause decrease in mental disorders, rumination, obesity, etc).

2. biophilic design benefits - increase cognitive function, concentration and memory

• Improved memory, cognitive performance in office setting in VR (Aristizabal) in a study involving three groups over a 10-week Virtual Reality open office biophilic design study. Working memory and cognitive performance improved in all biophilic design conditions compared to baseline.

• Lower levels of absenteeism/higher productivity levels (Kellert) when daylight is incorporated into office and school buildings

• Student test scores increase, lower dropout rate (Kaltenegger ch. 13). In school buildings with increased natural light, students test scores on average rise between 7-25% due to increased cognitive capacities.

• Attention Restoration Theory (ART) (Kaplan/Jimenez) states that spending time in nature causes humans to refresh their mental state, overcome mental fatigue and improve mental focus and attention

• Increased memory and creativity as exposure to green spaces can positively affect brain development in children through creativity/discovery/risk taking opportunities

3. biophilic design benefits - enhance positive mood states, promoting a sense of vitality and purpose

• Exposure to natural light increases a neurotransmitter in the body called serotonin, which increases happiness (Kaltenegger ch. 13)

• Research shows that exposure to the natural world can reduce negative thought patterns (Bratman). Two groups were assessed, one walked in nature and the other on a busy street, the former experienced an increase in positive thought patterns and a decrease in negative thought patterns (interestingly, this is the same part of the brain linked to depression), whilst also stated they felt a decrease in overall stress levels and anxiety.

• Biophilic design in urban environments can significantly enhance positive mood states by integrating natural elements into city settings.

• Biophysical services (if larger scale/parks etc.). The physical changes that nature creates causes benefits to humans (ex: if more parks, people may be more encouraged to go on a run near their house for example, thereby reducing obesity risks, cardiovascular disease, and so on).

Benefits of nature exposure <> benefits of biophilic design

Biophilic design studies are slowly becoming more common (see our own studies into the benefits of biophilic design here) but much of what is out there is still based on reviewing a number of key research studies done a while ago. Biophilic design plays a crucial role in promoting sustainable development by integrating natural elements into built environments, which contributes to sustainable architecture and the transformation of healthcare spaces.

There is considerably more information available on how nature exposure positively affects humans, and a lot can be inferred from these studies as the properties of nature exposure are similar, and correlations can be reasonably inferred.

• Biophilic design studies are slightly different than nature-based studies but there is considerable overlap, for example

• window/nature views could be included in both

• natural light/sun exposure could be included in both

• greenery/vegetation could be included in both (although likely on a smaller scale with biophilic design)

Direct nature has been proven to have the most wellness benefits but indirect exposure (ie, looking at a picture of a tree) still has health benefits too - this is how a lot of examples of biophilic design can justifiably claim to be wellness spaces even if they do not contain any direct biophilia (i.e. living plants or trees).

This does however mean that white blood cells known as Natural Killer (NK) cells may not increase with some examples of biophilic design interiors as there are likely far fewer or even no phytoncides in those spaces that a real forest provides in abundance (see forest bathing research for more on this).

Tsao, Tsung-Ming et al. “Health effects of a forest environment on natural killer cells in humans: an observational pilot study.” Oncotarget vol. 9,23 16501-16511. 27 Mar. 2018, doi:10.18632/oncotarget.24741. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5893257/

Examples of biophilic design sources referenced above:

Aristizabal, Sara, et al. “Biophilic Office Design: Exploring the Impact of a Multisensory Approach on Human Well-Being.” Journal of Environmental Psychology, Academic Press, 9 Sept. 2021, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272494421001353.

Bratman, Gregory, and Gretchen Daily. The Benefits of Nature Experience: Improved Affect and Cognition. Tech. Vol. 138. Stanford: n.p., 2015. Landscape and Urban Planning. Stanford University Libraries. Web. 24 Oct. 2016.

Jimenez, Marcia P. et al. “Associations Between Nature Exposure and Health: A Review of the Evidence.” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 18.9 (2021): 4790. Crossref. Web.

• Note: this source was used for ART/SRT info (although original theory names given credit above)

Kaltenegger, Ingrid. “Integration of Mother Nature into Smart Buildings.” Integration of Nature and Technology for Smart Cities. By Helen Santiago Fink. Switzerland: Springer International, 2016. ch. 13,18. Print.

Kellert, Stephen R., and Bill Finnegan. “Biophilic Design-The Architecture of Life Viewing Guide.” (n.d.): n. pag. Biophilic Design. Tamarack Media and Stephen Kellert. Web. 7 Dec. 2016.

Yin, Jie, et al. “Effects of Biophilic Interventions in Office on Stress Reaction and Cognitive Function: A Randomized Crossover Study in Virtual Reality.” Wiley Online Library, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, 11 Sept. 2019, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ina.12593

Yin, Jie, et al. “Effects of Biophilic Indoor Environment on Stress and Anxiety Recovery: A between-Subjects Experiment in Virtual Reality.” Environment International, Pergamon, 24 Dec. 2019, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160412019336347?via%3Dihub

Biomimicry and Biophilic Design: Biodesign Insights by Danielle Trofe - Wellness Design Consultants

the potential of mycelium as a healthy building material / examples of biophilic design that are truly sustainable / biomimicry as a leading light in the new field of sustainable design

Welcome to episode 43 of the Green & Healthy Places podcast, brought to you by Biofilico healthy buildings & interiors.

In this episode I’m chatting to Danielle Trofe, a biodesigner with her own studio in New York who also lectures in biomimicry for The Pratt Institute and Parsons New School. Danielle is a part of the green building movement herald, promoting sustainable and biophilic design.

Danielle’s MushLume collection of lampshades made from organically grown mushroom mycelium and hemp have featured in the seriously cool, eco-luxury 1 Hotel Brooklyn Bridge amongst other projects and she is a leading proponent of biofabrication - that is using naturally grown materials in product design.

Our conversation covers all of these ‘bio’ terms that may understandably be new for many of you, we also look into the full Life Cycle impact of a design product from production through to end of life, we discuss how biophilic design can when delivered poorly equate to a largely superficial greenwashing of the interior design process, and we introduce the topic of green chemistry, that is research and development around new bio-based materials that designers such s Danielle can then introduce into future product development.

Conversation highlights

• biophilic design allows us to connect to nature indoors, reminding us that we are still part of nature

• a label of ‘nature-inspired’ doesn’t necessarily mean a product is good for both people and planet, poorly delivered examples of biophilic design may in fact be harmful to the environment

• biomimicry as a movement is emerging as a rigorous framework for creating design that takes into consideration both our own health and that of the planet.

• I think a lot of the biodesign field is really about taking action, it’s not just the study of it but rather how we can actually start making goods that help restore balance back to our ecosystems.

https://danielletrofe.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielletrofe

https://twitter.com/DanielleTrofe

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FULL TRANSCRIPT FOLLOWS COURTESY OF OTTER.AI (excuse typos)

Matt Morley

Let’s begin with some terminology, specifically ‘biodesign’ and ‘biofabricated design’. How do you describe those two concepts to someone coming to this subject for the first time?

Danielle Trofe

In this past decade, or maybe even a little bit further, biodesign as a term has kind of come out in two different fields, one in the medical field and one in the design field. It’s serving a purpose as this catch all term that incorporates biomimicry, biofabricationbiophilic****design, to help those who don’t really know what each of those different facets really means. So that we can all kind of have the same conversation.

What is Biofabrication?

Biofabrication is what I do, it's about using a living organism to actually grow a product or design for you. So you're typically extracting something from nature or not, you can actually grow in a lab and and use that living organism to do the producing for you. In this case, I'm not not doing the manufacturing, the organism is actually doing that, for example mycelium - the roots of mushrooms - but also bacteria, algae or kombucha.

What is biophilic design?

I refer to Biophilic Design as the visual copying of nature and natural elements. We all have Biophilia, we all instinctively connect to nature in different ways, biophilic design is about tapping into that emotional state, that very native energy that we all have inside of us. Biophilic design has been shown to improve cognitive performance and provide health benefits. It allows us to connect to nature indoors, reminding us that we are still part of nature.

What is biomimicry?

Biomimicry goes a bit deeper by looking at Nature’s forms, processes and entire ecosystem, so it has these three different levels in other words. The aim is to draw out these principles to integrate them into human design to address any design or engineering challenge. Biomimicry involves understanding how nature overcomes similar challenges to the engineering challenge encountered. It leverages nature's evolutionary problem-solving to solve technological challenges.

Matt Morley

I think it’s very clear that you’ve mastered those concepts, it’s often so difficult to give a succinct description of concepts like biophilic design, yet you just managed to do it! Part of your work is in fact in education isn’t it? Besides being a designer you are also a teacher on biomimicry?

Danielle Trofe

Yes, correct. So I’ve been teaching biomimicry and biodesign at the Pratt Institute and the Parsons New School in Manhattan. I try to help orient students with an understanding of what this new field of nature inspired design is all about. That’s really what it is, it is a very new field, that is still unfolding, these terms are really being birthed at the moment, we continue experimenting with them.

Terminology can also vary from region to region. I know in the UK and in Germany, there are different terminologies for biomimicry for example. Everyone involved in this field is collectively trying to come up with a language to be able to talk about these particular topics such as biophilic design.

Matt Morley

There is so much discussion now around healthy buildings, healthy materials and wellness interior design on one side, with concerns over the sustainability of our buildings and interiors, the impact of our built environment on the planet, on the other. It looks to me like biodesign bridges those two worlds of wellness interiors and sustainable buildings.

It is not contributing waste, nor damaging the environment, and at the same time biodesign products are non-toxic, so these bio materials are inherently healthy and help contribute to an Indoor Environmental Quality plan.

Danielle Trofe

Yes… but with the caveat that it is done correctly! So let’s talk about that. Yeah, there is poorly delivered biomimicry, biofabrication or indeed biophilic design, right? You could create something that looks exactly like a tree. But if you’re using materials that can’t be recycled, that take tremendous amount of energy to create or that are mined unsustainably, you’re not really completing the holistic viewpoint of what biomimicry is, or hopefully in the larger sense, bio design.

My point is that just because it can fall under that label of nature-inspired, that doesn’t necessarily mean that a product is good for both people and the planet. The issue is that there’s nobody really there to judge what is or isn’t a high standard of biophilic design, for example.

So we’re kind of evolving together to be able to evaluate our own designs. Even if you are taking inspiration from nature, do you have the understanding and the tool set to be able to authentically factor in a products complete life cycle assessment, including where it’s coming from, how it’s affecting humans / nature during its use phase and the end of life disposal?

Whether that’s biophilic design, bio design, biofabrication or biomimicry, one thing that really stands out when you work in these fields is that there’s a greater framework for ensuring that a design meets all those needs throughout the process, from inception to production and end of life. This framework ensures that the number one thing and biomimicry is life can do, life creates conditions conducive to life.

That’s where I feel biomimicry as a movement is emerging as a more rigorous framework for creating design that really does take into consideration our health and the health of the planet.

Matt Morley

You’re practicing what you preach as you apply those same theories in your own products. And so that, in a sense leads us into the MushLume Biofabricated Lamps discussion. Why don’t we talk a little bit about how you have created a case study in a way of how to implement these ideas in a product-led business.

Biofabricated lamps

Danielle Trofe

Sure. Yeah, so about eight years ago, I started working with this amazing material that was coming out of upstate New York that was created by Ecovative - a mushroom mycelium material. And so for anyone who doesn't know what Mycelium is, it is the roots of a mushroom.

So just like an apple is the fruit of a tree. Mushroom is the fruiting body of this network of mycelia that live beneath the forest floor. And nature is the big recycler you know, it decomposes all dying and decaying matter in a forest or in an ecosystem. It connects all plants and an ecosystem actually is nature's communicator, it shares information, can warn other plants of impending danger, distributes water within a forest, shares nutrients underground… It really is this incredible organism that is one of the largest terrestrial organisms on the planet. There's one network that's known to be a couple 1000 years old in Oregon and stretches several football fields long.

Mycelium and hemp as healthy materials with positive health benefits

We take this mycelium and instead of extracting it out of nature, like we often do for most of our goods, we are we are inoculating it in a lab and reproducing it, then once it is in a liquid form we combine it with hemp and let nature do what it does best - grow! For that we put it in an environment that it wants to grow in, allowing the mycelium to bind to the hemp over a course of just a few days. You will see this white matte structure that actually solidifies all of the hemp.

The hemp is just used as support material for it to grow into, and also food as well. So cellulose, it wants to digest the cellulose. To give an understanding of the application of a lampshade, we create these forms, we pack them with the substrate that's already been inoculated. And then we just leave them to grow, we're not even adding additional water or energy into the production process!

Our largest lampshade, which is a 24 inch diameter dome takes about a week to grow. And if you think about this timeframe, to be able to use wood, you know, you're looking at anywhere from 25 to 100 years of a tree growing out in nature, and then you're harvesting this and you're putting all this energy into being able to process the material to use it.

We isolate mycelium in a lab, transport it a very short distance, and then let it grow in the course of just a few weeks. So you can already start to see the life cycle impact there.

The other most important part which is something that we're not as familiar with, but we're starting to understand its value now, is at the end of its life, the mycelium product is just going to decompose!

Biodegradable at end of life

Traditionally, in the last couple, maybe last 100 years, we've really wanted things to last. We want things to last as long as possible, we want them to be super durable. But we're starting to find out and especially since the invention of plastics that these might not be the best concepts. And rather than using materials that we're not quite sure how they're going to break down to an elemental form and affect our own bodies. We know exactly what's in these lampshades and they are going to actually add nutrients back into the soil rather than pollutants. So that's a completely different concept to a lot of our traditional goods.

And often people are like, Well, is it gonna break down in my living room but it's actually a very inert material. We do bake it at the end of its growth cycle, that's mainly to damage the cells enough so it won't continue to grow in your living room. It won't spore, it won't shoot off mushrooms. It's a completely stable, inert material in your living room. There's nothing that's going to break it down.

What's more the lampshades have this incredible soft feel, almost like a lamb's ear. So it's something that you actually want to touch. And there's not many lamps out there that inspire you to interact with it. And of course, that makes it a conversation piece, being able to talk with your guests at the dining room table about the light fixture that's overhead.

Matt Morley

You are rightly pointing out how long a lampshade really needs to be with us, where's that sweet spot between durability and being biodegradable. I wondered whether the lampshade had anything inherently suited to this particular medium. Could you have done any other number of things but you randomly selected the lampshade? Have you got an entire collection of products in your mind eventually?

Danielle Trofe

Yeah, so that's an excellent question. Part of the story is that Ecovative at the time was working mainly in packaging. So using the material to displace Styrofoam, which is a fantastic use for it.

We reached out to them, ordered samples and we wanted to start working with the idea of using it for a lampshade and it was kind of a crazy idea at that level eight years ago, and it ended up being one of the best use cases for it because of the material's properties. So to give everyone a better idea - when fully grown, it's very lightweight, it almost has the density of Styrofoam, but has a much softer exterior coat, which is actually the mycelium.

We can actually tune the material and kind of play with a little bit with its coloring. So yeah, we do have some that are not completely white. And that's the other thing about them. Once it's grown, the Mycelium is white, naturally. And that's how we leave them. So there's not any paint that's added to them. That's just the natural form that the mycelium takes.

Mycelium as an alternative to plastic packaging

It's great for packaging for single use packaging but it has limitations in terms of you a product like a chair or stool that is going to get bumped around, rubbed, scratched or knocked over. But for an object that's hanging above you suspended from the ceiling or perhaps a table lamp that's not always being touched, then that's a perfect case for using mycelium.

There were a number of years of us getting over shipping issues, modifying the form so that when they ship they don't crack or break, and they can be installed easily by the end consumer too. So there were huge learning curves of bringing this biotechnology to a place where you could commercialize a product.

I used to grow everything in Brooklyn, New York, I had a studio space here, and I would grow each one by hand. And just over this past year, year and a half, we move production to a company out in California who now grows all the lampshades for the studio. So we're able to finally expand past my own capabilities.

Biofabricated materials as a future trend

You're really seeing not just the general public, but the industry start to buy into Biodesign. Early on when we started to work with this material, nobody really knew what mycelium was, it was kind of a new term but the conversation has really shifted in the last five years so people know what Mycelium is.

There's all these startups around the world now working with mycelium whereas when I first started, there was maybe a handful around the world. We're talking single digits. So it's really been larger than just one studio or just a few companies. It's now so many young startups, working around biomaterials because they see the value in creating new products that are not going to necessarily pollute the planet or provide a negative impact.

Algae as a healthy material in design

Matt Morley

The other big player then, that I think deserves a mention in our conversation is algae - another biomaterial often mentioned in the same breath along with mycelium. Are you working with algae based materials too?

Danielle Trofe

Yeah, just when I started working with it, and it was for a completely different project, I ended up closing the studio to shift focus a little bit but we do work with it, for example an algae-based pigment to color the lampshades. We're collaborating with artists and designers to paint on our lampshades using algae ink. A start-up in Colorado has developed a new ink pigment derived from algae, which is fantastic.

There's also the Biodesign Challenge, which is a nonprofit organization that has a worldwide competition for young students to be able to create Biodesign applications and then have them be judged by professionals within the field. And there's been so many startups that have come from just these kinds of competitions, and you're really starting to see this field being driven by people that are under 30.

I really I do believe it's the generation underneath mine that is really going to power everything in terms of sustainability because they've inherited something that generations before did not - there has to be action. So I think a lot of the biodesign field is really about taking action, it's not just the study of it but rather how are we can actually start making goods that help restore balance back to our ecosystems.

Matt Morley

You collaborated with the 1 Hotel brand - they arguably reinvented what ‘eco luxury' could mean in hospitality. Can you talk to us about that project to help them create an example of biophilic design in one of their suites using your mycelium lampshades?

Biophilic design with natural elements in hotels

Danielle Trofe

Yeah it was fantastic. Working with 1 Hotel, that really was the project that elevated our lampshades to the next level, we did around 130 lampshades in this huge cloud in the presidential suite at the 1 Hotel Brooklyn Bridge. Biophilic design in hotels can support positive health benefits for guests.

Just working with 1 Hotel as a partner, it was really fantastic. We share the same values and be able to create different kinds of opportunities where the public can participate. So for instance, we had an exhibit where people could come in and see the lampshades being grown for the hotel. One of the things I realized is to hear the conversation that we’re having now, it’s really difficult to not physically see and feel the material, or watch the growing process. Demystifying that experience was really valuable.

The images that we got from that project really captured the possibilities of what our MushLume lampshades could do and have inspired a few other hotel installations since then too. We have grown from that as well I think, those images really did solidify that this is not just a case study. This is not just a single project but a commercialized product - that differentiation was huge. From there, we could move beyond this small niche to compete against big lighting brands, while also supporting positive health benefits through biophilic design in hotel suites.

Vertical gardens

Matt Morley

You've also got a vertical garden product that looks to be essentially a sort of an upright, vertically oriented planter for multiple plants. I'm wondering if you've got more things in the pipeline. Where do you go from here?

Danielle Trofe

Yeah, so the vertical garden was actually originally a hydroponic vertical garden. So that was the first product I ever created. And we launched that back in 2012. And it really kind of grew into a couple of installations with BMW.

The vertical garden now exists in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. So if you go to their Visitor Center, you can see it there. And it's something that hasn't completely come to full realization, mainly because I started getting into the lighting and that kind of took off. But it's something I do want to bring back and one of the main reasons this was lagging is because at the time there weren't the tools to be able to create those planter pods. They look kind of look like Alien eggs, if you will.

So we created them out of thermoformed plastic which went against everything that I as a designer and as a studio believed in. So we've kind of been in this holding pattern to get to the right material and the right process to be able to recreate this. And that's actually being done right now, with much more sustainable materials.

For example we're looking at upcycling food waste into ceramic planter pods. So that's definitely something that's happening in the future. We hope to actually come out with a full product and not just an installation.

As for future, it's a good question. I recently became a mom. So a lot of things have really shifted. You know, even a fetus can contain over 100 Different manmade chemicals at that stage yet it's extremely difficult to find healthy materials or healthy interior products aimed at babies. That's the next thing I want to get into - green chemistry, and being able to actually bring products that are not toxic to our environments.

Green chemistry to develop new natural materials

Matt Morley

So the green chemistry thing for those who perhaps not clued up on it, that’s really where the nature-inspired R&D is taking place that then facilitates people such as yourself as a designer, to create the bio products you envision, that then are sold to bio-friendly businesses like 1 Hotels with their biophilic design in the bedrooms. Green chemistry is a crucial part of sustainable design, focusing on creating products that are environmentally friendly and efficient. It can help create products that mimic natural forms and patterns.

If you haven’t got the green chemistry, providing you with what you need - the tools and materials to create the products - then the products can’t materialize yet. These products can enhance human well-being and connection with the natural world.

Equally, if there isn’t also the consumer demand, the end market there to make it all into a viable business proposition, then the products either don’t materialize or remain prototypes and concept designs. So we have this delicate dance required to push the industry forward…

Danielle Trofe

Exactly - what you’re doing with the Green & Healthy Places podcast is also helping these fields to advance, by communicating these ideas to a wider public. We need to popularize the basics of what Biodesign is about, biomimicry, biophilia, all of the ‘bio whats’ to our industry and beyond, to consumers because ultimately consumers are driving the demand for these bio materials and bio products as well.

Clients are asking for things that are more sustainable. And they’re also starting to ask the questions. Well, where does this come from? How was it made? Hopefully ‘where does it end up?’ will be the next question that they’re going to ask…!

https://danielletrofe.com/

Danielle’s products are available in Europe through https://www.grown.bio/

Living Walls in biophilic design with UrbanStrong NYC

A conversation with Lily Turner of UrbanStrong NYC for my Green & Healthy Places podcast episode 039 on sustainability and wellbeing in real estate and interiors.

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Conversation highlights

Living walls offer a myriad of environmental, psychological, physiological and economic benefits

Plants have the ability to purify the air, they should be thought of as natural air purifiers.

Plants also are wonderful noise pollution mitigators

We as living creatures share a deep affiliation with nature - this is called biophilia

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green & healthy places

Welcome to episode 039 of the Green & Healthy Places podcast in which we explore the themes of wellbeing and sustainability in real estate and interiors.

I’m your host Matt Morley, Founder of Biofilico healthy buildings and Biofit wellness concepts.

This week we’re in NYC talking to Lily Turner, Director of Operations at UrbanStrong, a company providing green building technology solutions for enhanced productivity and wellness benefits.

green roofs and solar coming soon

In particular we focus on living walls and living wall dividers in this episode. Lily references Alan Burchell a couple of times, UrbanStrong’s Principal, so we have Alan lined up for a subsequent episode already when we’ll discuss solar and green roofs in urban environments. Lily meanwhile is quite the green wall expert!

biophilic design living walls

The discussion covers the health and wellness benefits of living walls within the wider context of biophilic design principles, the practical constraints of installing a living wall or, at a smaller scale, a standalone living wall divider, moss walls as a hassle-free alternative in low or no light scenarios, the air purifying, noise reducing and mood enhancing benefits of these installations, as well as the interplay between green and healthy building certifications, city wide legislation and the type fo interior greenery solutions offered by UrbanStrong.

If like me you normally listen to your podcasts sped up to 1.5 normal speed you may want to bring this one back down, we’re in Brooklyn here people, so expect a short, punchy convo with just a touch of the borough’s background noise for authenticity.

If you enjoy this episode, please hit subscribe, new episodes are released every week. Lily’s contact details are in the show notes, check out urbanstrong.com now let’s get into it.

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Matt Morley

Why don't we start with you describing the showroom that you're currently sitting in?

Lily Turner

Yeah, sure. It's amazing. I come every day and walk into a jungle, which I'm very thankful for. But our studio / showroom is located in the iconic Brooklyn Navy Yard in Brooklyn, New York.

Urbanstrong is technology agnostic, meaning we offer several different greenwall technologies depending on project goals, or design parameters, or of course budget. That being said, Our studio is full of different living law systems, small and large, everything ranging from $300, to what could easily be a $100, or $2000 $200,000 green wall system. And they all feature different irrigation designs too.

Matt Morley

That's a key thing, right? The idea of the different irrigation systems on it, there's a lot of different solutions out there. So we're mostly talking about vertical gardens today, and their various shapes and sizes, right. So before we jump off into any other directions, why don't we talk about those living walls and the systems that are out there, and which ones you work with ?

Lily Turner

Yeah, so like I said, we offer a range of different living wall technologies as part of our biophilic design offer, we have everything from the DIY, or I like to refer to as the ‘PIY’ - plant it yourself.

They're fairly intuitive designs and all encompassing. So really, all that's required for these little plant frames is that you mount them to the wall using nothing more than a couple drywall screws and anchors like you'd be mounting a shelf or a painting.

Then there's dedicated pockets for you to plant these four to six inch potted plants in and the irrigation design with those systems are capillary wicking action. So it's no different than a tiki torch concept. You know, there's a cloth or string draped in a little reservoir of water, and then it creeps up the cloth and the plants roots get the drink that way.

Matt Morley

In terms of constraints when installing a wall and then keeping it alive in the medium term. I know there are some horror stories out there about walls that die and then need to be replaced. In your experience, what are the hurdles that someone should be aware of before jumping in to a living wall purcase. So just being conscious of what precautions can be taken in advance so that everything runs smoothly.

Lily Turner

Sure, of course, with any living thing, and let's just focus on plants for today's call, water and light sources are required to keep plants not just surviving but thriving. So of course, a reliable and somewhat automated irrigation design is necessary for all living life.

If you don't have immediate access to plumbing, which oftentimes retrofits or light renovations don't, then a recirculating irrigation solution is required, which just calls for a submersible silent pump, no different than what you'd find in a fish tank.

In terms of lighting, every living wall manufacturer designer has their own minimum or their own standard for the amount of foot candles and exposure the wall receives. For us we’re a bit higher and a little more strict on that. But we require artificial lighting to be brought into the space if there's not enough natural lighting, exposed to the wall.

Matt Morley

Is it a particular type of artificial lighting or LED?

Lily Turner

So I do want to compliment the lighting industry, they've really come a long way. A lot of people still actually think when they hear grow lights, they think of those really disruptive red and purple shining lights. But now there's a ton of amazing LED lights, metal highlight lights on the market that can match the warm interior lighting of the other fixtures, anything from like 2700 to 4000 Kelvin.

Matt Morley

So is it the intensity or the color spectrum that's of most relevance for the for the plants?

Lily Turner

It's a bit of both, you know, plants read a certain color spectrum, the reds and the purples and that is needed for them to photosynthesis sorry photosynthesize, but also a certain footcandle level is required for them to be happy. And that's even true for our low light tropical plants.

Matt Morley

So there are large format installations but you also have the smaller solutions such as standalone panels now that have integrated lights and irrigation systems, right? They're kind of complete solutions that are mobile too, correct?

Lily Turner

Right. Absolutely. I think you're referring to our mobile living wall dividers and are a lot of fun and they're increasing in popularity as well. I suggest those to designers and architects on a weekly basis, they're great for the post pandemic return to the offices. They're definitely more living and thriving than those nasty Flexi glass or acrylic partitions that you might see in spaces.

But with our mobile living little dividers, you're absolutely right, we have a LED bar that kind of cantilevers from the top, and then a water reservoir, depending on the unit can hold anywhere from 100 to 150 gallons of water. So all that's needed is a standard 120 B outlet, which is usually found in an office space, versus some of our customisable, larger living law systems that we spec, you know, we need a proper water source and cold water zones running through, we also need drainage, and then again, we need to bring in the artificial lighting. So that can get a little costly.

Matt Morley

Then effectively there's two paths. This one's where you just need a smaller scale intervention, and one where there's a bit more space available. If we take a step back then and look at the ‘why’ behind this, what sometimes ends up in conversations around Biophilia and ‘nature first’ arguments in which it's almost as if nature in itself is enough justification for doing these things as a quasi Romantic argument. What is the ROI on these living walls from your view? When you talk about biophilic design, we talk about the benefits, the wellbeing mental and physical benefits of being surrounded by or spending time close to one of these green interventions within an interior space.

Lily Turner

Yeah, I'm glad you asked about that. You know, like you said, living walls are first appreciated, and for good reason for their aesthetics. They're considered obvious striking forms of natural art. But, like you said, living walls offer a myriad of different benefits from environmental, psychological, physiological and economic benefits.

Healthy indoor air

So first, I mean, just touching on environmental benefits. Plants have the ability to purify the air, they should be thought of as natural air purifiers. And oftentimes, you know, indoor pollution levels caused by things like cleaning products, or building materials, carpets, paints, mold, can be even worse than those outdoor pollution levels.

So in most living wall systems, the plant root zone absorbs Volatile Organic Compounds such as benzene, formaldehyde, acetone, ammonia, to name a few. And it works like this, the air is actively drawn through the plants and the growing medium, and then the cleaned air is redistributed throughout the building.

And then also for environmental benefits, we like to touch on reduction in urban heat island effect, which in dense urban areas, and concrete jungles like New York City, you know, the use of plants, parks, living walls, and green roofs really work to reduce the heat by cooling the ambient temperature around.

Plants also are wonderful noise pollution mitigators. So plants can absorb about up to 40% more sound than traditional facades can.

And then, of course, increase in biodiversity with exterior living walls. This has been depleting again in dense urban areas as we continue to develop with hard materials, like concrete and glass. So living walls just provide those alternative ecological habitats for migratory species.

Biophilic design

And then for more psychological and physiological benefits, you know, people just feel more relaxed in natural settings. This is a premise to biophilic design, or just biohilia, in general.

So we as living creatures share a deep affiliation with nature, and life is attracted to other forms of life. So in this innate affinity for life, this provides opportunities for building owners and designers and architects to really foster environments which elicit positive responses from their tenants or their shoppers, workers, patients of whoever's interacting in that space.

Matt Morley

There is this balance between the yin and the yang, between the tangible, practical side around, you know, noise absorbing benefits for example, and air purifying, then the slightly harder to pin down and quantify benefits around the Biophilia hypothesis, right?

There's just this there's just this connection in all of us and within our psyche, and we just same reason why it feels good to have a quiet moment in a garden or a forest just to listen to the birds sing, you know, just occasionally to do that and be a natural animal. versus being this urban version of ourselves. And I think, you know, with enough of space with enough space given over to these green walls, you can really start to get into that. And I think that's the magic here.

Lily Turner

Absolutely. You know, we as humans are just so deeply connected and interwoven with nature and the natural world. And realizing that I mean, it is starting to become measurable, some of it can be considered or perceived as a bit of a reach. But there is substantial evidence, white papers and journals produced around productivity costs and creativity costs associated with a worker, employee retention rates is big. And then also, the ability to reduce recovery times, which I know hospitals appreciate. Not to be crass, but sometimes it's almost treated like restaurants, they want you to heal as quickly as possible turn over the bed. And when you add all that up on an annual budget that can save them hundreds of 1000s of dollars.

Matt Morley

Yet the hospital recovery rates, one is interesting, it does come up quite a lot. I mean, I think when one digs into the, you know, the original Roger Ulrich study, which I think was like mid 80s. You know, once that's asked questions of why nothing more has been done since then, in terms of creating some some solid data because we all go back to that same study that was done quite a while ago.

But then you see what's happening in places like Singapore and Hong Kong, where they're starting now to integrate no serious levels of biophilia into their latest hospitals. And and that's for me a real sign that there's there's a commitment on that level, and that there's a sense of, of tangible benefits, tangible health benefits around those recovery times an offer sort of the mental, the mental health piece, you mentioned, the air purifying benefits.

Do you need to choose therefore specific air purifying species within the plant walls? In order to do that?

Lily Turner

Sure, that's a great question. And that goes back to our initial assessment with a client and architect and just really trying to identify the goals of the product, or the project and sorry, so if the client is really set on air purification, then we will incorporate species such as Chinese evergreen, peace lily, Snake plants, ZZ plants, some species are known more for their indoor purification than others. And that's simply due to the kind of electro magnetic charge in the air with the dust particles and the plant leaves.

So they're actually sucking the dust and harmful particulate matter out of the air, if not to their roots. But you can also see it on their leaves, too. So what might look like water spots, if you look closely, it's actually just just built up. And those leaves also as a part of, sorry, that leaf cleaning is also a part of our maintenance that we do. So the plants can again, properly photosynthesize sides, and we're not kind of filtering their life that they received and also use.

Matt Morley

So what you reference there is the idea of having to ask very common theme, but the idea of needing to, on a case by case project by project basis, establish priorities around planetary and people health and well being. And it's I think it's it's one of the toughest parts of doing what we do, which is that sometimes it's just not possible to do everything and to sort of hit the high note, both in terms of environmental sustainability and human health and wellbeing and sometimes somewhere along the line, there's a call to be made, for example - we really need to focus on indoor air quality in this office environment.

You also have preserved moss walls, which in some ways, I think create a similar visual effect, perhaps not quite the same, and yet still very much part of this sort of what how can we bring a biophilic component and to pretty much cover an entire wall or as a panel. So how do you see those and how do you typically communicate around them versus having a real living walk because the moss is effectively preserved? Right?

Preserved moss walls

Lily Turner

Yeah, absolutely. Well, I mean, I can't speak for other companies, but our preserved moss is harvested according to ecological practices.

So the moss is preserved using a food grade safe glycerin and then natural dyes are pumped back into a different species to really give that vibrancy, but it very much, I mean, you can almost think of it as taxidermy, right? I mean, very much of the texture is still there and The color and, and it does also still have that Woody smell, especially initially when we install a larger scale moss wall. But moss walls are great. And for the longest time, you know, I always kept them in my back pocket, I just had such a love and admiration for living walls. And that's how I got my start. But I really did a ton of moss walls just due to last year, you know, new construction was was halted all over the world. So we really had to come up with a retrofit solution.

For the people that still work continuing to design their interior homes or, or spaces are preserved. Moss doesn't need any water or light to thrive, which is really great. I won't say it's zero maintenance, because I have installed mass walls in lobbies before and just when you're handling especially in New York City, when hundreds of people are going through that lobby, there is a bit of foot traffic. And sometimes the moss walls can take a beating if people want to tug and pull on things, you know, even as adults were so curious beings, but I really do think, yeah, there's a time and place for every system. And if I was, you know, consulting with a client, and they said, Hey, we can't give you any water light, then I would absolutely and I do absolutely recommend our preserved Moss, because it's a great way of incorporating still a natural element into our built environment, which is ultimately the goal.

Matt Morley

I've used them in the past on gym design projects where, you know, there's a brief around biophilic design or biophilic interiors. But as is often the case with a gym, or some kind of a wellness space or physical activity space, you know, it's a lower ground, but there's no natural light, or it's sort of an internal room, where again, there's just no access to daylight. And and so they're pretty much have to flip into muscle or moss panel territory. And yeah, I think just reading between the lines, I think it's worth clarifying that there are products out there that are not of the same eco friendly standard as yours. So there are versions that are not using natural dyes, etc. So I think that's what I picked up from doing my research on particular ones that you stock. And it kind of highlighted that in my mind that, you know, there is some variety out there in terms of quality and eco friendliness, so good only for finding the right one. So to say.

Lily Turner

Yeah, absolutely, we definitely heavily that every technology that comes in, we do offer quite a range of technologies. But again, they've all been carefully considered and, you know, tried and tested before we bring them into a public or a client space.

Matt Morley

So I know it's not your areas of expertise. But I know you do also do the green roofs and the solar panels within the urban strong offering. So just as a very sort of quick overview. How do they integrate into the you typically selling? Or going in on a project with multiple strands? So sort of multiple product? offerings? Or is it and the synergies between them almost?

Green roofs

Lily Turner

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Um, so Urbanstrong, does specialize in design, installation and ongoing maintenance for living walls and Green roofs. But we also, there's another side to our business, which Alan we'll get more into, but the financing and the technology consulting side, so we have a lot of condo or Co-Op board members come to us.

New York just incorporated a few local laws mandating that folks outfit their roofs with either solar or green roof. So a lot of people are calling us and saying, Okay, I want a green roof, oh, no, I want solar? How do I decide between what's the ROI associated. So we'll walk them through a very careful assessment, we'll ask some really high level questions mainly around the structural integrity of the roof. Just because there is a weight load associated with our different greener systems, you know, you're dealing with growing medium soil and all of that.

And also, just, again, their goals if they want, you know, if they have enough capital upfront, and they wanted to invest, then we think solar is a better option. Because right now the payback period is great. It's not just net metering. We, I'm sorry, New York just offered up this community solar program, that you can actually sell your energy back energy that you collect far beyond what the building is using. And it's a nice little passive revenue stream for, for the building owners.

Matt Morley

So there's either at that slightly more strategic level, there's, there's either something happening at a municipal or a city or state level whereby there's new registered legislation coming through and that, in a sense is designed to push the industry forward. And collectively, within the real estate interiors industry, for it to encourage more integration of natural components, I think in in a sense is doing the same type of work, but in coming at it from a different angle as the building certifications that are out there. Things like USGBC’s LEED and WELL and FITWEL that in their own way, do a similar job which is nudging us all forward particularly in real estate to work. greener and healthier solutions. So how do your particular products fit in with all that?

Green building and healthy building certifications

Lily Turner

Absolutely. And LEED and WELL are great, they're both amazing standards and organizations. And they have largely been responsible for, like you said incentivizing building owners and architects to start incorporating natural elements into their designs.

When we're discussing exterior living, long installations for LEED, several points are possible. And that's just due to reduced heat island effect, potential for water efficiency, meaning that you could harvest stormwater and work it into the irrigation design of the living wall, through collection.

And then other points, of course, are gained through optimizing energy efficiency performance, that's through thermal insulation or systems. Innovation and operation is another category and then occupant comfort. And that's all within the under the LEED umbrella. And then for the WELL building standard living walls helps satisfy three out of the set seven core concepts of that standard. So it's air mind and comfort, comfort is mostly associated with the plant's ability to mitigate noise pollution, and reduce sound in an area.

Matt Morley

So lead slightly more towards a fundamentally based around sort of planet, an environment and well coming at it from a more more human aspect, just to close them in terms of what you you have lined up and where where the business is going. And where you see yourself developing and future into the product and services like what's coming next. What's what's in the pipeline for lift, Robin strong.

Lily Turner

I mean, if you asked me last year, the answer would be completely different. I applaud urban strong, we've always remained really flexible. And our willingness to pivot I think has really helped us through especially COVID. Last year, we released an online store with a shippable, plant DIY friendly systems I was explaining earlier. And that really got us through and also connected us with consumer base.

One thing I really don't love about the living off system is that fill, there's a minimum square footage assigned to it just due to the economies of scale, and therefore there's a minimum budget that you need to have, which is can be upwards of $25,000.

So it's really excluding to the small, medium sized budgets. So we're really excited about that revenue stream that's tailored and focus more on the consumer. And then also, and this is more Alan's area of expertise or principle, but our ability to just really consult and help building owners, or property developers and condo and Co Op board members that have a budget and don't really have access to education sources and don't know really, how did they spend their money, and you know, how it fits in with our goals. So we're really excited about not just the roofing but the living wall aspect as well.

Matt Morley

Very cool. Well, we're going to line up a separate conversation with Elon to go into some of those other juicy subjects. So thanks for your time. If people want to reach out and contact you, obviously, as a website in terms of social media or other channels, what do you what are you mostly focused on?

Lily Turner

Yes, our website is great. I think on every page, we have a call to action, contact us or let's chat button. We like to consider ourselves really accessible. And we just love having these conversations. And then also our Instagram handles urban strong NYC, we post not only our projects, but our partners projects, and then just really notable products in the industry we like to put a spotlight on and just keep up to date with what the new technologies are and what you can do with these living long, greener systems. And then, of course, my personal email also should be on the website. But maybe we can post that too, in case anyone has any questions or follow up. comments on this.

Matt Morley

Awesome, Lily, thanks so much for your time today

Lily Turner

Yeah, I appreciate it, Matt. Take care. Happy Holidays, till next time!

Circular Interior Design: Soma Studio Milano — Wellness Design Consultants

Talking Circular Design with Soma Studio Milano - advisors, trend forecasters and content producers focused on the circular economy

a conversation on circular design for the Green & Healthy Places podcast

“sustainability alone is no longer enough - besides not doing harm to the planet, we also need to do good. We can’t only sustain the current system, we need to regenerate”

— ana luiza magalhaes

Matt Morley

This week we’re in Milan, Italy, talking to Ana Luiza Magalhaes the Brazilian co-founder ofoma Studio](LINK 1), a company engaged in the circular design sector as b2b advisors, trend forecasters, content producers and all round expert guides for those seeking to improve their knowledge of this relatively new industry that we call the circular economy. Soma Studio Milano works with interior designers to implement circular design principles, emphasizing the importance of incorporating sustainable practices into interior design to foster a more sustainable future.

We talk about the key principles of this new interior design concept, the product categories in real estate and interiors that are excelling in circular design terms, take-back programs for used furniture, surfaces made of bio materials, waste as a design flaw, the importance of collaboration between brands, how nature offers guidance for circular designers, the endless potential of mycelium to replace plastic in future, the Eco wellbeing interior trend in homes as well as the role of biophilic design within circular economy.

Ana Luiza Magalhaes

So Soma is a Milan based studio working to help professionals and companies to take action and shift from a linear to circular economy. And to do so we strive to raise awareness, provide relevant information to strategies within the circular economy and circular design. It is important to incorporate sustainable materials into interior design projects to minimize environmental impact and contribute to a more resource-efficient future. And then in terms of services, always under this umbrella of circular economy in design, we offer strategic consultancy for product development, which includes transfer testing, transporting and material research.

We also create content such as ebooks, reports, webinars to help organizations raise awareness around the superior economy and superior products and services. And we also create short courses, lectures or workshops in collaborations with companies and educational institutions.

Matt Morley

So in a way, you’re providing a series of consultancy services that are intended to push the industry forward by making it easier to integrate and understand circular design circular economy principles, would that be a fair description?

Ana Luiza Magalhaes

Yes, this would be a very good description because we try to raise awareness, educate, educate people and professionals and make it easier for them to apply the similar principles within their organizations and work in projects.

what are the circular design principles?

Matt Morley

And how do you define circular design and would you consider it in some ways to be different to let’s say, sustainable design or environmentally friendly design.

Ana Luiza Magalhaes

So, I think when we talk about circular design, we need to think about the three main principles of the circular economy which are designing waste out of products, systems, keeping materials and products in use in regenerating natural systems.

So, when we talk about structural design, we are dealing with a whole system from production to disposal and therefore with production in consumer waste. Circular design aims to minimize environmental impact through sustainable practices, focusing on restoring natural systems. When it comes to sustainable design or eco-friendly design, which are definitely important concepts, we are talking more about meeting the needs of the present without compromising the future of the planet in the next generations.

So we are talking more about minimizing our impact. However, we believe that with climate change sustainability alone****is no longer enough - besides not doing harm to the planet, we also need to do good. We can’t only sustain the current system we need to regenerate. And I guess this is the biggest difference between circular and sustainable design. Circular is more about the system as I mentioned in regeneration.

Matt Morley

Effectively you’re encouraging businesses to take full responsibility for the products that they create. Rather than produce something, sell it to a client and perhaps offer some customer service during the in-use phase but the relationship effectively ending there, taking no responsibility for what happens at the end of use phase, the circular approach includes what happens and how you reintegrate something back into the system.

the role of waste in circular design

So companies, they need to be held accountable for the construction waste they produce, they need to allow consumers to return materials and products, which is not really the case. For example, when we think about computers, phones, so they need to think about the whole system, you know, doesn’t matter if they do something with a sustainable material. But in the end, the consumer doesn’t know what to do with that when they don’t more than that product.

Circular design in real estate and interiors

We see that furniture design is taking important steps towards circularity with different approaches. So for example, we see some brands launching take-back programs to allow their clients to return their used furniture, IKEA is doing that in the US. So their clients for example, can return IKEA furniture get a discount on new purchases, while the brand turns those used materials into new resources.

Using furniture made from recycled materials is also crucial in circular interior design. This not only helps in reducing waste but also promotes sustainability by repurposing and repainting these materials.

Another approach that some brands are using is modular design, which allows for repair remanufacture and recycling. For instance, we see that with sofas in his leaping systems.

A very good example that we spotted at the London design festival in 2019 is from a Scottish design company that’s a modular sofa that you can repair so you can extend the lifecycle of this piece.

And also recently at the Milan Design Week, we saw the customm modular sofa by matches with the same idea of modular design.

Another interesting take on circular furniture is the emergence of companies renting office furniture instead of selling. So furniture becomes a service with companies have the possibility to rent and then return them after some time. And then these pieces can be used by other companies, or can be remanufactured or recycled into new materials. So this is very relevant nowadays for the circular economy because we are talking about services in ownership.

And we also see some remarkable innovations with come when it comes to surface design. We have now stunning tiles made of plastic waste coming from our oceans or from textile waste from the fashion industry.

We also see surfaces using biomaterials, like mycelium and innovative technologies to recycle vinyl floors. So yeah, we see a lot of steps forwards into secularity, we think different products.

Matt Morley

If we look at it from the other side, then where do you identify the problem areas? So what are the sectors or the products within interior design as an industry where you’re seeing the most work still to be done?

Waste is a resource in design

There is much more to do to transition to a circular economy. But in our opinion, what is really missing overall is more collaboration between different players. Because when we talk about the circular future, this future is only possible when we consider the whole system from production to disposal, including the challengesand demands related to the extraction and consumption of raw materials in a linear model. So brands must collaborate with each other, with designers, with consumers.

So for instance, one company’s waste can be another company’s resource. And as we were mentioning earlier, a company must be held accountable for their waste, what is really not happening with computers, phones and smart appliances for homes. So I think we need to work further to collaborate because collaboration is key for this circular economy. And it’s not so easy to do that between brains or brains and consumers and designers.

Matt Morley

So it’s an optimistic message and that you can see the solution. And we have a way through and a circular approach is really the way to resolve the issue of creating all this waste. But do you think perceptions of waste are changing now even that word, waste?

Closed loop cycles in design

Yes, definitely. So with the rise of the circular economy in interior design, we are turning our attention to nature and in nature, there aren’t linked fields. So nature basically doesn’t generate waste - it turns everything into resources.

Optimizing production processes to make them more energy-efficient and generate less waste is crucial in this context.

So materials flow in circles - one species wast is another species food, so more and more designers and architects are seeing waste as a design flaw.

So this is changing their approach to waste from organic waste to industrial waste. Everything now can be repurposed. All this waste is becoming a valuable resource. And this is happening not only with plastic, but with all kinds of industrial waste.

Matt Morley

Do you see a strong potential for biomaterials as an alternative? So just moving away completely from plastics or even recycled plastics and finding more bio based materials as an alternative route forward?

Recycled plastics and bio-based materials

I think sustainable materials have a lot of potential, of course, it’s something that we still need to explore more and manage to produce in large scale, because with some materials there are not enough support to make them more scalable. But I think that’s the future because again, it’s looking at nature to find solutions for our problems. And I believe this is the best way to to deal with climate change and all the environment crisis and waste.

And one of the materials the bio materials that is really a great material and it has been explored a lot lately is mycelium, which forms the root system of fungi. It’s really amazing because it’s fire retardant, has excellent insulation and acoustic properties, can sequester carbon, and it’s biodegradable and non toxic.

So we see mycelium used in lamp shades, acoustic wall panels, furniture packaging, often replacing plastic. Yeah, so I think there is a lot of potential for biomaterials.

Wellbeing interior design trend

In the past years, we have seen wellbeing becoming one of our highest values, even in Major Design festivals like Milan Design Week, London design festival, Dutch Design Week that designers and architects are starting to pay much more attention on how spaces can affect our creativity, efficiency, and overall wellbeing.

Embracing circular design principles in architecture, interior design, and construction is crucial for fostering a more sustainable future.

We see a lot of professionals and brands exploring neuro-aesthetics, biophilic design and how to create spaces for cocooning. So within this context, we see for example, soft and tactile materials becoming important in helping to integrate technology in our homes and also workspaces in a more natural and human way. And the pandemic has greatly accelerate this trend.

Now we have a new sort of wellbeing that we call eco wellbeing, which is about living a more sustainable and circular lifestyle. It’s about welcoming the imperfect and impermanent state of things inspired by the Japanese Wabi Sabi’s really strong now as well. And finally, it’s about feeling physically safe, while we face pandemics.

So we need to work we need to entertain ourselves, you know, we need to do everything at home and yet feel safe in your shirt. So wellbeing is very strong that homes also workspaces, hotels and public shared spaces. The idea is really to provide people with places to feel safe and reassured to cope with their very fast speed digital lives in all the multiple crises we are living through, like climate change, the health crisis, recession, and so on. So people really need spaces to feel reassured, to recharge in. So that’s why I think wellbeing is something that will only evolve and improve.

Matt Morley

You mentioned biophilic design, as well. I’ve noticed obviously a huge increase in interest in in the topic over the last 18 months really in the COVID era. But it was already happening before then - do you think that’s something that will completely change the way we think of buildings and interiors in years to come or is just another trend?

Biophilic design in buildings and interiors

No, I don’t think biophilic design is just a trend that will fade away, we see biophilic design As part of our journey to reconnect with nature and restore our broken ties with it, we believe that biophilic design can help us realize that we are part of nature that we have this innate connection and affinity towards the natural world. And above all, that we are responsible, we have responsibilities towards it.

The Circular Building by Arup in London is an excellent prototype using circular design principles, constructed with sustainably sourced materials and designed for easy disassembly, promoting resource efficiency and minimizing waste.

So and in fact, scientists have proved that nature does have a positive impact on us, both psychological and physiological. So we believe architects and designers will continue to improve their take on biophilic design, providing us with new shapes, forms, materials, and technologies that bring nature closer to us.

So I think this will only evolve, not fade away. And recently, we saw again at the Milan Design Week, very interesting options for outdoor kitchens and outdoor furniture, especially the ones designed for public urban spaces.

So we also see not only interior spaces, but cities trying to promote more their public spaces, like parks where people can interact and be in contact with nature. So we really believe believe there is no turn turning back when it comes to biophilic design.

Matt Morley

I wonder how you see that connecting with and integrating an element of technology? I think there is perhaps a misunderstanding of biophilic design that it’s trying to return us to some state of primordial nature and therefore, technology is not a part of that vision. What potential do you see for wellbeing design and biophilic design to integrate elements of tech?

Wellness tech in eco wellbeing interiors

Well, I think technology is really key for our eco wellbeing and in many ways for biophilic design as well. We see new technologies, for example, that allows for sofa fabrics to purify the indoor air, improving its quality and also improving our wellbeing our health.

There is a need for new business models that support circularity in the industry to fully leverage these technological advancements.

There are also technologies that make surfaces much easier to clean, which have become top priority to reduce the spread of germs indoor and make us feel safer. So again, we will impact our wellbeing.

We also see multi purpose and easily assembled furniture that accommodates different needs either at work or at home and make our routines more flexible, lighting technology that is evolving to set different moods in the same space, smart gardens becoming very popular in allowing us to grow our our own vegetables and spices, regardless of our home natural lighting conditions, we also see that technology can improve the planet’s wellbeing because it helps us manage our waste either at home or at work spaces. Technology can turn surplus into new resources, decreasing pollution and so on. So technology is definitely key to to help us with our wellbeing and to improve the ways we work with biophilic design I believe.

Matt Morley

You do talks, workshops, trend memberships, how can the industry typically engage with you?

Yes, so we have different approaches. So for example, we can work with manufacturers, product manufacturers, to help them identify future trends or also doing material research. We recently did that we for example an American tire company. We also provide circular consultancy, to help organizations on how to implement circular design principles within their products. Source services. We also work a lot with education.

So you know, because for us, the first step towards this transition to the circular economy is really to educate yourself. So we provide content that’s relevant within the circular economy and circular design, to companies or educational organizations, and so on.

We also collaborate with media outlets. And we have this product, as you mentioned, our train membership and some ebooks and webinars that we do in partnership with an Italian blogger and architect Italian bark.

And we provide people with the latest news innovations and trends in interior design, which always includes regular news and innovations. So we can we have many different services, but always within this, bro. Bigger topic, the supply point, I mean, supply design

Matt Morley

That makes complete sense. You know, I think there’s there’s so much movement happening in this industry that not everyone can stay up to date. And there’s a lot of confusion. I think still there’s a lot of these the terms and a lot of we don’t necessarily know how, how to go about making things better. What you do is effectively like you’re an educator, you’re there to help fill in the gaps and, and boost understanding increased understanding of why this matters.

Ana Luiza

Yes, we also like to build bridges between two companies in order to manage their waste. For example, we also do reports on events, you know, if a company wants to see what’s happening in a particular design fair festival, and they cannot go or even if they go but they want our insights. We also do that. We consider ourselves researchers and educators and content creators, a bit of everything really.

Healthy sustainable furniture by Benchmark UK

Talking healthy materials, circular economy principles, biophilic design and Life Cycle Assessments with Benchmark Furniture, in Berkshire, UK.

Welcome to Episode 34 of the Green & Healthy Places podcast, in which we explore the themes of sustainability and wellbeing in real estate and hospitality. 

I'm your host, Matt Morley, founder of Biofilico healthy buildings and Biofit wellness concepts. 

This week I’m in Berkshire in the English countryside talking to Sean and Laerke Sutcliffe of Benchmark Furniture.

Set up by Sean with his business partner, the late Sir Terence Conran, in 1984, Benchmark may be an artisanal workshop of 70-plus people but they have also been trailblazers in pushing forward the theme of green and healthy furniture in recent decades.

They’ve worked with Foster + Partners, Westminster Abbey, Oxbridge Colleges, museums and countless public buildings around the world. In our conversation we cover:

• How they stance on sustainability has evolved over the past 40 years to incorporate health and wellbeing

• The history of VOCs and Formeldehyde in wood workshops

• The link between tropical timbers and deforestation

• Vertical integration as a way to control the provenance of their work

• How hiring apprentices locally ensures long-term staff retention

• Their brand extension into healthy upholstery using NaturalMat filler

• Life Cycle Assessments and the metrics of environmental impact that matter

• Their thoughts on ‘biophilic furniture’ and the medium of wood

If you like this type of content, please hit subscribe, you can find Benchmark at benchmarkfurniture.com and my contact details are in the show notes for feedback and comments.

• https://www.instagram.com/madebybenchmark/

• Made WELL Sustainability Report

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HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE CONVERSATION

our workshop considers both People and Planet, our carbon footprint and the transparency of our materials

here we are on a redundant farm, employing more people than the farm ever did in agriculture in high quality artisanal jobs

We produced the first wooden furniture in the world that had fully verified lifecycle assessments

I hope a time will come when we will base taxation of products, not on an arbitrary figure of the of the pecuniary value but on their carbon cost

as human beings, our oldest and most trusted relationship with any material is with wood

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FULL TRANSCRIPT FOLLOWS COURTESY OF OTTER.AI

Matt Morley

I would like to start with a question around your the positioning of the business itself. So you seem to have this wonderful combination of craftsmanship, sustainability, and responsible business practices. And it feels so now it seems so current, and yet, you've been around for a little while. So I wonder if you could place that in context? Did you set out with that initial vision, and the world has aligned or has it been more of an evolutionary process over the last 30 years or more.

Benchmark Furniture / Sean Sutcliffe

So we set out 39 years ago, when we started the workshop, with a highly unusual stance in the furniture making community I took a rather stubborn stance that I won't use any tropical timbers. And people were quite dismissive, and some people are quite offended. But I had been learning as a young man about deforestation, and particularly a prime forest. And so my stance then was - we like to use wood, but we won't use any tropical timbers. Because that way, we are not deforesting, and we're not using any endangered species. And that was our stance for many years.

What's happened over the intervening nearly 40 years now is that the argument has moved. And so what is our stance is now not so much that we won't use tropical timbers, although we choose we prefer not to. But it now embraces so many other things that we've learned over the last 40 years.

We were the first workshop in the UK to go zero formaldehyde, the first workshop in the UK with FSC chain of custody (FSC) Certification - we've we've always tried to look ahead at the way that the sustainability arguments and the health and wellbeing arguments have gone.

People tend to think that the health and wellbeing argument is pretty new. But actually, 25 years ago formaldehyde became the hot topic. And what we're saying today will change tomorrow, because the situation on the ground will change, science will change, imperatives and priorities will change. Now everyone's very focused on carbon. But, some while ago, everyone was very focused on acid rain, say or eutrophication.

Laerke Sutcliffe

But I think it's also interesting to sort of look at it from both the planet and the people angle. And that has become quite important for us within the last six years to have a position where we both consider the carbon footprint and the transparency in the materials that we are using. So being that workshop, or that destination, where you as a customer can come and buy your product and combine the carbon footprint, and the non toxic material considerations together.

Matt Morley

You mentioned the word transparency there - clearly, a responsible business, in a way needs to take ownership for presumably a bit more than just that final piece of the puzzle, have you adopted this process of vertical integration? And what role has that played in helping you get to where you are today?

Benchmark Furniture

We've done it over a long period of time. But in truth, most of our vertical integration came about through a simple desire to have more control over the quality of our work, and the provenance of our work.

Nowadays, vertical integration also gives us more control over the wider aspects of employment practices, diversity practices, and so forth that play into the supply chain argument. So we happily, frequently get asked quite deep and complex questions about our supply chain, and the more that we can supply from under our own control the simpler that process is.

Of course, we've still got our materials supply chain. But in terms of subcontract supply chain we use very, very few subcontractors.

Matt Morley

You also mentioned the idea of employment practices. And it's something that really comes across in terms of your communication online, the idea of adopting responsible work practices that really seem to be a part of your DNA and as a business, was that an instinctual process?

Benchmark Furniture

Yeah, I think I wish I could say there was some greater and higher good about it, but actually, it was very simple. A realization some years into running the business and training people, that if you employ locally, your retention is much better.

So we started off employing graduates and students, or craftsmen from far afield, you know, other parts of the UK or overseas, and they’d come to do a few years, and then normally go back to their places of origin so we thought, well, this is mad, we started employing and training apprentices only from my local area.

It may sound a bit mean, but when when aspiring apprentices apply to training here, if they haven't got a pretty local postcode, they're not in the running. That a self interested thing about keep retaining staff. But of course, what it also plays into is our journey to work miles are very low.

We have very long employment profile here. And so we really do care very deeply, we've got second generation staff here, which is very gratifying. So it started out purely as a way of keeping staff. But it actually has evolved into a very good employment practice in terms of local employment and, and artisanship.

The countryside has lost most of its skilled jobs. And here we are on a redundant farm, employing more people than the farm ever did in agriculture in high quality artisanal jobs.

Matt Morley

There is then also that connection in terms of the materials as well, a key piece of a healthy interiors and healthy building strategy. So employing and working locally. And then as you mentioned, not using tropical woods. So could you talk to your vision of, of cradle to grave lifecycle in terms of the materials that you're using for your products, and perhaps place that in the context of the wider industry? Because it's not necessarily an industry that's known for getting everything right, in that sense, but you've really taken a stance on it.

Benchmark Furniture

Yes, and we, we have the great advantage that we our principle material is wood, I mean, 99% of everything we make originates as a tree. So we have a fantastic advantage in terms of sustainability, providing that we're making sure we're buying our wood entirely from sustainably forested sources. And that's an absolute must for us, you know, we will only do that.

The materials that do extend beyond wood into upholstery, for example, we've changed radically our approach to upholstery, because that's where there is use of petrochemical foams, which is almost ubiquitous in the in upholstery world. They're very nasty business.

We were really lucky that some 10 years ago, we started working with Imperial College London on lifecycle assessment. So we did this as some projects that we did with the Royal College and, and the American Hardwood Export Council, looking at measuring the the real proper metrics of cradle to grave lifecycle assessments. We produced the first wooden furniture in the world that had fully verified lifecycle assessments.

And we've continued to do that, it's an evolving science in it - It's an imperfect science still. But we now on all our core ranges do environmental product declarations, which include lifecycle assessments. And we're able to give not just the carbon content or the carbon store, of the pieces of furniture, but also all the other measures the other seven measures of environmental impact that are embodied within the work we do.

So it's a really fascinating things. And in order to be really transparent, and protect against a world that is flooded with greenwash, we really need metrics. And is only through lifecycle assessment and independent verification, that we can get reliable and proper metrics and people can, can see and trust the knowledge they've been given about the impact of what they're buying.

Laerke Sutcliffe

I think we also decided about I think it's five years ago, that we wanted to take it to the next level as Sean was saying, the fact that all products today are declaring themselves ‘sustainable’. So you know, where does that leave us, a firm who truly has been sustainable from the very beginning, before it was something cool?

Where if we wanted to keep leading the way in terms of taking it to the next levels, how did we best interact with the movement, so we decided to have third party verification to be able to put the hard facts on the table.

So in that process, we had to go back and analyze a little bit the materials that we were using, so glues, oil, and upholstery was our biggest challenge. And we then went into to a process of putting quite a bit of pressure on our supply chain, which I think is needed, you know, people, like ourselves and our friends in the industry required a lot of responsibility in terms of choosing the materials that we put out in the world.

So if we can put that pressure on the supply chain saying, guys, unless you can meet those criteria, so there was transparency. In our case, we wanted to have a declare label on the products, so unless the products that our supply chain provided could meet that the low VOC basically, they couldn't deal with it, we couldn't deal with them.

So we had to have some upfront meetings about either we work on this together, and we get to where we need to be at, or we have to go and look for other places to source our core materials. So I think that was a really interesting process.

And as Sean say, you know, we obviously come from a very good starting point because we work mainly in timber, but we still did have to do get our clues and our oils and, and PE and really in engage with the upholstery. And I don't know if it's worth it going into sort of like a deeper sort of description of how we did

Matt Morley

So the even the idea that your furniture could be unhealthy, that a flame retardant, a chemical process is going to off gas into your home or your office over the first six to 12 months, the idea that the adhesives might do the same and lower the quality of the indoor air in your space. And also you mentioned the filler but I saw that you'd found an ingenious solution by working with a UK company that I know from Devon who do the wonderful natural mattresses - so you went to a natural mattress company to find a solution to fix the issue around nasty foam filler as your upholstery?

Laerke Sutcliffe

That's right. And and I think as I said, you know, we started out by putting pressure on the existing supply chain and didn't actually get anywhere. For us, it was quite important to actually do the heavy work ourself, because you get into the grid of what it actually really takes to not just tick the box, but actually do the right things.

So we, in the research process, it became quite clear for us we had to be thinking, innovative, and as additive, and NaturalMat has been quite revolutionary in the way that they have providing their different materials to build up their mattresses. And so we reached out to them and said, You know, this is what we are trying to achieve. And actually, today, if we really want to do some massive changes, we believe we have to collaborate across industries. And be and think a little bit above, just sort of like the day to day, you know, and what we set out to do goal wise, our mission and so on.

We actually became really good friends with the guys running NaturalMat, and we had to persuade them that you know, guys, come on, let's work together. And let's try to, to do things in a way that is not necessarily the conventional way of doing things.

Benchmark Furniture

I do think that we're all going to make a lot more difference if we collaborate more. And if we, if we have as much openness and transparency about what we're doing. So we have a rule here, anybody can come and visit our workshops, you know, industry competent competitors, whatever, they can come and see what we do and how we do it. Because on our on our own, we're going to make very little change. But if we can help lead away and and larger and perhaps more influential businesses, financially influential businesses can can see that there's a way forward and follow suit, then, then we're going to be very happy to have shared that knowledge.

Laerke Sutcliffe

We do also on our website, we actually share our composition of how we managed to put together our post street at the end, because that was also quite a process of finding both comfort and, and sort of actually meeting the first fire retardant natural fire retardant within the build up of the structure. So we did put quite a lot of sort of testing and effort into getting there. And as shown saying, instead of sort of, you know, could putting a copyright and sort of being proud about it.

We actually say, guys, give us a call. This is how you do it, we show it on the website, and yeah, very open to share. And I think it's also important to mention that we you know, we have walked the walk and come a long way, we still have a lot to do, and we will keep walking. But we are never, never trying to look or come across as the expert in the industry, but more the sharing people that we hope you will follow. If that makes sense.

Matt Morley

Talk to us a bit about the OVO furniture collection because from outside it looks like it's encompassing a lot of your values and the principles behind the business in one - is it sort of the furthest you've gone so far in terms of delivering on that?

Benchmark Furniture

Yes, the OVO range was the first of our core ranges that we did for environmental product declarations on and it for me It embodies the very best of design and I think the design is the best of modern design. It's simple. It's tactile, it’s biophilic, you just feel good in its presence, you want to stroke it. It's non toxic. In its consistency in its materials, it has a measured embodied carbon declared on it. And in almost all cases, other than the leather upholstery pieces, it's, it gives us a sort of net carbon store or people even call it carbon negative, but we call it a net carbon store value.

I think it does embody the best of of what we do. But we've extended the environmental product declarations now to many more products. And we've had some external consultants write algorithms that enable us to do this in a simpler way, we still have to have the figures verified by third party peer reviewed, but it does enable it to be more streamlined. And it is a bit burdensome, and a lot of businesses just cannot see how they would ever do it. But the processes are becoming simpler.

Models are being built that will enable makers of anything really to do this, and it's just gonna be very valuable. I hope a time will come when we will base taxation of products, not on an arbitrary figure of the of the pecuniary value but on their carbon cost - being a much more real cost as we face You know, the climate situation we we face. So, I think that that it's really important the sharing of knowledge and the making it easier for businesses to to produce lifecycle assessments or environmental product declarations.

Matt Morley

There may not be government level legislation yet around targets for the carbon impact of furniture in a new workplace. Let's say if that workplace or the owner, the real estate developer signs up for a LEED certification process and indeed the well process there then, in a sense that provides that structure that then gives additional credits and effectively encourages the industry. And someone like myself was specifying which furniture should be put into these 12 floors of offices.

Were then out looking for brands, businesses, products, such as they have a collection that have that epd behind them, and they're then rewarded with credits on the on the overall project score. So I think there is a commercial angle to it, if anyone's still not convinced that it is the purely the right thing to do. When one is aligned with LEED or BREEM certification, one of these systems, there are literally points scored for purchasing products that have these EPDs. And that seems to be the best we have in terms of nudging the industry in the right direction.

You mentioned biophilic design, and it's typically referenced for entire spaces, and a lot of people think of effectively plants. But I'm big advocate for biophilic design being much more about things like texture, colours, patterns and natural fabrics.

Unusually though, you mentioned it in the context of your furniture. So from where you sit, how does this trend if we can call it that reflect a shift towards a more natural approach to interiors? How are your pieces talking that language of nature?

Benchmark Furniture

So our pieces of furniture do speak as a very natural piece because principally, they're made of wood and as human beings, our oldest and most trusted relationship with any material is with wood. It is the most in any survey done anywhere in the world at any time. Wood is the material that gets the greatest amount of trust and credibility from the buying public.

I just believe I know that we react very well. When we can see that something's made of wood and preferably have solid wood. The fact that we can touch it, the fact that we can feel the grain we can see the grain it just takes us into a natural world. There are all sorts of measures that that are starting to be done or on the the brains reaction in relation to to nature and there is some science We're starting to get some science that is actually able to pinpoint, specifically which parts of our brain react well.

But I'm also a great believer in instinct. And I regard instinct as being a little more than the sort of distillation of 1000s or hundreds of 1000s of years of experience in existence of the race. If our instinct is to accept and trust and feel good in the presence of material, then you're probably right. And we don't give enough credit to instinct we tend to look for, for sort of scientific explanations for everything, and yet we accept that instinct exists within the way a whale migrates or swallow returns to its nesting site, we accept that instinct exists, but in everything except human beings.

I think we should listen a little more to our instinct, and everybody feels better, closer to nature. And if that closer to nature means sitting at a wooden table and feeling a piece of wood, or sleeping in a wooden bed, or having a wooden floor, a wooden wall, then that's also beneficial.

Laerke Sutcliffe

I think, also more indirect, for instance, our new collection, our new fabric collection, has aspects of biophilic by the fact that it's created in in natural materials and without the need of any fire retardant treatment. So aspects like that, that, you know, if you keep if you're building up products are spaces with only materials this either, yeah, natural or not, in need of any toxicity for any treatment. That layers up, in my opinion, they biophilic design.

So I think but as you're saying that biophilic design is quite often misunderstood by you know, just at the very end of the project, you putting a few sort of plants, in plastic pots around the green wall, the green, green wall, you know, it sticks much deeper than that, then then then then in how you are creating a space in layers.

Matt Morley

I noticed one of your previous projects was the Maggie’s Center in Manchester, I had the opportunity to collaborate with Lily Jencks, the daughter of the late Maggie on one of my early projects and Lily, a landscape architect created a wonderful green gym space for us. And I when I saw that you'd also been involved on a Maggie center in Manchester, I just thought what a great one an obvious connection and so fitting.

So perhaps you could just describe a little bit the involvement there because again, I think there's a real connection with with biophilic design and creating a nurturing space and it's essentially a cancer care center. So a place where it's real mission, its purpose is to nourish and calm and relieve anxiety.

Benchmark Furniture

Yeah, I'm I'm a huge fan of the Maggie's charity and Charles Jencks his vision. After Maggie's work, it was Maggie's vision in her own lifetime, having suffered that, that sort of shock of being diagnosed with cancer, and you walk out of the oncology department in some big hospital, and where do you go? Where do you take that shock. And their vision was that you take it into a Maggie center, and that these centers should seek in every way to sort of calm and reassure and comfort you. And nature is in their view, and I would share it entirely the greatest comfort at that moment. And so all Maggie centers are built as much as possible in natural materials. They have gardens, they have a big kitchen table where you can give away which encourages a sense of community and sharing of your that moment and of of your diagnosis or treatment afterwards. And so we've actually been involved in a lot of Maggie's projects Manchester was was one of them, which was a foster and partners project. But we've done a lot of the Maggie centers and I think that sadly, I'm Charles Jencks has he's died there, but the the charity continues, and Garner's a lot of goodwill for very good work, but it is that central thing of putting nature at the heart of a building, whether it be through gardens, planting, natural materials, tactility shape form, and undoubtedly every Maggie's that I've ever been into Give a feeling of wellness sort of ironic when actually tend to be rather full of people who are unwell with cancer. But but the the physical environment is a very well environment.

Matt Morley

There's then also the topic of, of circularity and circular economy and durability and something that one can really sense with with your work is that no doubt due to impart to the vertical integration to the level of craftsmanship to the quality of the products and materials, something that's going to last.

And you've really committed to that with this idea of almost sort of a take back scheme at the end which connects with the idea of circular economy and I'm a big fan of this, I think pretty much everyone needs to get on board. But it seems to be a slow takeoff. How have you adopted that approach? And what have you learned so far from that?

Benchmark Furniture

So I think our stance on this started with with the concept of lifetime repair. What we make is inherently durable, because we operate with high levels of craftsmanship, and hopefully good design, where durability is built in and designed in. But the concept of lifetime repair. I think it was it was probably Patagonia and Yvon Chouinard, and in my awareness of the work that he'd done on it, I thought, well, that's all free.

So of course, we should offer lifetime repair, it's an easy thing to do. So that was the starting point. And then the circularity argument, as it's gained momentum over the last 10 years or so, really took us beyond that to what is a relatively new initiative for us of take back scheme, where anybody who owns our furniture, we do have geographic limitations, which are just for the purpose of the practicality of recovering and bringing it back.

But essentially, within this moment, we operate it within the UK, we can collect there for if it's no longer required, it is no longer relevant, useful. Or the or the circumstances of the owner have just changed. We can take it back, we can give it a value depending on the condition of it, which is then issued as a credit against more furniture that we can supply.

But then what we take back, we seek to either repair, refurbish, repurpose, reuse, or at worst recycle. And because it's all natural materials, they're recyclable. And so in order to, to offer that and do that, you have to think at the design stage and the making stage about well, how easy is it to repair, how easy to take it apart? when this comes back to us, you know, are we going to be able to take it apart until you start to think even when you're making it for the first time about how you're going to remake it or repurpose it or refurbish it.

There's nothing new I mean, you know, it's it's centuries old, the concept that that furniture should be able to reuse and repurpose it was you know, furniture used to be the one of the very high value items that any household owned. And so it had to be transportable, it had to be repairable and somehow we lost sight of that.

So we're only really seeking to reintroduce something that that has been around. But yes, it's it's an exciting, it's an exciting new avenue for us. And it also hopefully will bring a new audience to us because there will be this, this body of furniture that's available for for resale, refurbished furniture for resale. And that hopefully will bring us new customers as well. So we will I hope it's good business as well as good for the world.

Laerke Sutcliffe

But also as you say, it sort of starts already from the product development point of view. So we have a when we start new projects we just about to go into a new product development process this month. And when we start out a collaboration like that, we have a wheel that we sort of measuring all the or the starting process and all the way through really up against this wheel. And one of those is but if it's gonna last the life time, how do we then you know, how where do we start? So I think it's definitely starting from the very beginning that we are considering all of those different aspects which is ending up being there. They sort of finish it finished product,

Matt Morley

Effectively shouldering the responsibility for waste creation upfront in the production process in the design process because you know, you're taking ownership of that rather than designing and saying, Well, someone else can worry about what happens when it when it's finished when it when it's no longer needed.

Benchmark Furniture

Yes, but I'd also say we don't look upon it as perhaps waste creation, because what we take back is never waste. I mean, what we take back has opportunity, it has repurposing it, it has a resale, it has a lot of inherent embodied values still in it more than just the materials for recycling. So I'm the very, very last resort would be conversion into biomass fuel. But, but that would be the absolute last resort. So I really try to think that I would like to think that nothing we make ever ends up as waste, it just ends up as another kind of resource.

Matt Morley

Which is the takes us back to the wonderful circle rather than a linear, hopefully, hopefully, in some is admirable work. It's pretty great stuff. So you've obviously got retail collections, you also working with interior designers and architects, how are people connecting with you? Where are you present in the world?

Benchmark Furniture

People connect with us, I mean, I suppose our primary link is through the architectural community we've worked with, we're lucky enough to work with many of the world's biggest best and or most forward thinking architects. And so that is one of the major connections with the world.

We also deal with the furniture dealerships who have historically not been at the forefront of either either sustainable practice, you know, they'd be more interested in flogging a lot of furniture, then then what happens to it is lifestyle is the date its lifetime use. But actually that is changing. And pretty much all the dealerships are now having to engage in the argument.

And they have this whole, sustainable and circularity of health and wellbeing aspects now bigger, much higher in their customers buying profile. And so the dealerships are having to take that on board as well. That's another network that we that we operate through. And then I think just through the world of, of people who are interested in sustainability people like yourself, people like the planted, planted cities group that are looking at how we improve circularity, the way we view the products we consume.

Matt Morley

The good part there is that there's there's very little imagine sales process because the work speaks for itself. And there's a shared value system that one can just tap into and connect with because it's in one sense universal, although we wish it was slightly wider spread, of course, but for those of us who have bought into it and have adopted it as our worldview it's and we connect with see what you do, it's there is no conversion process required. It's just completely smooth. Well, that completely connects with how I see the world. And that's, I think, where the real value is.

multi-sensory wellbeing interiors

How to use light, sound, scent and texture in multisensory Biophilic design for wellbeing benefits

What is wellbeing interior design? 

Wellbeing interiors are simply indoor spaces that have been maximized for human health and wellness. These may or may not include consideration for sustainability as the focus here is primarily on People rather than Planet. The role of human senses is crucial in this context, as a fundamentally multisensory approach to design can enhance the overall well-being of occupants by considering a broader spectrum of human perception, including light, air, sound, and materials selection. Multisensory design is essential in creating meaningful experiences that engage users’ senses, impacting mood, behavior, and well-being.

It’s a subtle distinction and by no means one that suggests mutually exclusive concepts, in fact we would argue that the best examples manage to marry both, bridging both worlds, respecting the environment whilst also promoting enhanced health for occupants of the space.

Wellbeing design considers light, air, sound and materials selection. This is often delivered by a Wellbeing Champion either independently or as a consultant on a wider project team.

What is biophilic design?

Biophilic design combines elements of nature, health and sustainability in interiors and architecture.

Far more than just landscaping, in its finest examples, it maintains a strong visual connection between indoor and outdoor worlds through the careful selection of colours, materials, patterns, shapes and, yes, both living plants and non-living representations of nature.

Our ‘tools’ in this sense include indoor planters and mini gardens, living walls, flooring, wall decor, acoustic panels, natural artworks, furniture fabrics, even eco cleaning policies, aromatherapy, soundscapes.

Natural light in healthy indoor environments

Lighting in a home office environment is important not just for ensuring a respectable image on a Zoom call but also for its role on our mental wellbeing. Natural light is crucial for maintaining consistent circadian rhythms, promoting physical and mental health, and contributing to a healthy multisensory workspace. Digital design plays a significant role in creating multisensory workspaces that incorporate non-visual sensory aspects, such as smell, taste, and touch, to enhance overall perception and experience. Considering a broader spectrum of sensory perceptions, it may not be the first thing we think of in relation to Biophilic design and healthy indoor environments but it is a valuable component in any wellbeing interiors project.

In a workplace wellness strategy, both for home and commercial spaces, daylight exposure is key for well-being.

First up, it’s always a good idea to get a few minutes of direct natural sunlight within the first 30 minutes or so of waking in order to help regulate your circadian rhythm - use a smart light system that recreates that same spectrum of colour for you indoors during the winter months, these lights can also be used to replicate sunlight as your alarm clock all year round, assuming dogs, cats and kids do not get there first!

Similarly, when working from home place your desk set-up near a window to give you as much natural daylight during your work day as possible. When you need supplemental lighting, again a smart light system will allow you to program the colour frequency from blue-white in the morning to amber in the evening, easing you into the day and winding you down steadily at night.

In the evenings one should avoid exposure to intense sources of blue-white light. Halogen ceiling lights will struggle to create the right atmosphere mornings and evenings above all, so you’ll want to switch to a combination of standing lamps and task lighting (e.g. desk lamp) to give more flexibility.

Get this wrong and it can severely affect quality of sleep - we may even be able to fall asleep as usual but there will be less REM sleep and therefore less mental recuperation taking place during the night. Those with sleep monitors on their wrists or fingers should be able to produce their own data to verify this for themselves.

Clearly all screens, be they from a TV, computer or smartphone are possible sources of this same sleep-disrupting light, so ensure there is a program such as f.lux on your computer or just the TV brightness later in the evening - better yet allow yourself a minimum of one hour of screen-free time before bed.

In a family or work scenario where compromises need to be made for whatever reason, individually electing to wear a pair of amber-lensed glasses in the evenings does the same job. Again, it’s worth testing this out and monitoring your sleep quality if it is of interest.

Acoustics in wellbeing interiors

A healthy building needs to address acoustics and other sensory features in order to create a healthy indoor environment that does not promote stress, while aiding in concentration and, in a residential context, ensures high quality sleep at night.

Incorporating sensory integration into the design process is crucial for creating a healthy indoor environment, as it considers the impact of various senses on inhabitants and promotes well-being through a multisensory approach.

Sound insulating materials are often integrated into or under flooring tiles, dry wall insulation, decorative wall panels, room dividers, planters, furniture and even wall paint.

Distracting noises in large, open-plan office spaces can have a direct impact on worker wellbeing and leave staff struggling to find a quiet corner in which to do deep work alone.

Equally, a small room with no soft furnishings in, such as a second bedroom converted into a home office, will require either carpet or a rug, furniture and fabrics - basically anything soft to help stop the sound reverberating around the room.

Once an acoustic plan has established an agreeable baseline of background noise, then we can apply acoustic Biophilic design by bringing in subtle nature sounds or other forms of white noise to mask noise from HVAC systems and elevator shafts. This may not be appropriate everywhere but can, for example, be applied in specific areas such as a reception or waiting area, or canteen.

Sounds of trickling water could be a fountain outside, allowing nature sounds from outside to come indoors, acoustic world music, ethnic, or traditional music from around the world especially drumming, those are all evolutionary aligned soundtracks that are likely to promote focus and drive without distracting.

Delos in the US, the company behind the WELL Certification for healthy buildings, amongst other things, recently launched a biophilic sounds and mindfulness app called MindBreaks that offers high-quality 3D audio to help you “Escape, Energize, Rest, Meditate, Focus and Inspire”.

Acoustic sound booths such as these ones we sourced for the HERO food group’s corporate offices in Switzerland can also be integrated into a Biophilia plan by selecting suitable colours for the acoustic fabrics inside, options for models with wood (or veneer) panelling, placing plants around the booths and generally ensuring they integrate smoothly into the overall workplace design.

Finally, music with lyrics can be distracting at least in a language that we understand and there is nothing worse in a workplace context than a playlist that prevents us from doing our best work each day but as a rule, acoustic, traditional and ethnic sounds are going to be especially good at filling the void in a workspace context without demanding too much of your mental focus and attention.

Whether that is a realistic game plan for 8-10 hours a day or not is up to you and your colleagues to decide, perhaps just as we move around a workplace for different tasks, having specific playlists (or indeed a ‘no music’ policy) that match those tasks, might be a sensible solution?

Scent in Biophilic design interiors

So, we mentioned the idea of forest bathing a corollary of Biophilic design in interiors. Forest phytoncides are a particular airborne substance given off by certain species of trees that has been shown in South East Korea to boost the human immune system too.

When combined with what we know about the mental health benefits of spending time in nature, it’s clear that aromatherapy has a role to play in a multi-sensory Biophilic design strategy. This strategy emphasizes the importance of sensory experience, incorporating all five senses: sight, hearing, touch, smell, and even taste to create innovative and memorable environments. Adding layer upon layer of nature-inspired detail in a Biophilic interior concept can significantly enhance the sensory experience.

Invest in a high-quality pine or cypress oil for your home aromatherapy diffuser, perhaps combined with rosemary and peppermint to capture some of the same health benefits of spending time outside in a forest.

Think especially of how this could be done in a home office environment, for example, where a little Biophilic design can go a long way in creating a wellbeing interior geared for productivity and calm. The impact of sound in the workplace environment should also be considered, addressing both its positive and negative effects.

Equally, citrus oils such as bergamot and lemon are especially good for focus, followed by lavender later in the evening to help you wind down when the workday is done.

Texture in healthy interiors for sensory experience

Last but not least, let’s not forget the role of texture and sensory qualities in wellbeing interiors, as designing for all the senses with a carefully chosen natural fabric or finish with just the right amount of tactility can add an additional layer of nature-connectedness to a Biophilic design.

Man-made materials tend to be impossibly perfect compared to nature, so integrating natural materials such as wool, cork, wood and cotton in carefully selected places can invite a tactile interaction with the interiors. Plastic may be cheap and easy to clean but, at least from a Biophilic design perspective, it will never be able to compete with real wood or bamboo say.

We might imagine a decorative cork wall in an office reception for example such as those by Gencork or a textured jute rug by Nanimarquina in a home office inviting the user to spend time barefoot during the day.

Not all of the strategies need to be combined in every wellbeing interior but there is magic in integrating more than one of them as a way to add interest and intrigue…

Q&A with a Biophilic Design Consultant: Healthy Building and Wellness Interiors — Biofilico

How did you enter the field of wellbeing interiors, healthy buildings and biophilic design?

Biofilico’s Founder, Matt Morley at the creative workspace ‘Montoya’ in Barcelona, Spain

Biofilico’s Founder, Matt Morley at the creative workspace ‘Montoya’ in Barcelona, Spain

I spent 10 years with a mixed-use real estate developer and operator in what eventually became a Creative Director role delivering new business concepts. I’d work with the construction and development teams, as well as finance, marketing and operations, taking a sports bar, coworking space, business club, beach club or concept store from idea to reality.

It was an amazing learning experience for what would come later - effectively doing a similar thing but a boutique consultancy business and focusing specifically on green and healthy spaces, incorporating biophilic design principles.

Where did your interest in health, fitness, and mental health come from?

So in parallel with that 10-year process I’ve just describe my 7-10 hours per week of training starting to take on ever more importance in my life, especially as I was doing so much of it outdoors, immersed in nature, with minimal equipment.

I was also experimenting with standing desks, going barefoot, a low-carb Paleo diet and bringing the outside world in to my office and home. I aimed to bring nature into my living and working spaces to enhance wellbeing and productivity. Incorporating these elements into my living and working spaces helped to reduce stress and improve overall wellbeing. In other words, my life became a testing ground for these new ideas around workplace wellbeing, ancestral health and wellbeing interiors.

Do you remember the exact moment you first discovered biophilic design?

It was a very organic, intuitive process for me. This is so important to reiterate as a biophilic design expert - I got there by myself, using my own instinct and listening to my body, testing things out on myself and eventually coming to the conclusion that most indoor spaces devoid of the natural world were simply not happy, uplifting places for me to be. I realized that integrating biophilic principles, such as the use of natural elements and patterns, was essential to creating environments that promote wellbeing and productivity.

At that point, I knew I had to quit my job and make my own rules from then on. I needed to go to an extreme to understand what was out there, what was possible and what my body could feel if I went all-in on this approach for a while. I don’t think my then-girlfriend knew what on earth was going on by that point!

In other words, biophilic design was not something I studied, it was as if it came from inside of me first and all I had to do was recognize what was happening.

Of course, it helped to be immersed in real estate and interiors for my work at the same time, that was the magic mix that made it possible to become a wellbeing champion and biophilic design consultant later on.

What experts influenced you on the path to becoming a biophilic design consultant for real estate and hospitality?

Over time I worked out that there was a whole school of thought largely led by the US around how to actually do what I was talking about in a clear, structured way. Terrapin’s 14 Patterns of Biophilic Design and Stephen Kellert’s The Practice of Biophilic Design were fundamental reference points. Their work highlights the proven benefits of biophilic design in promoting wellbeing, productivity, and creativity in living and working spaces.

How did you become a consultant in healthy interiors and biophilic design?

I set up my first company, Biofit, back in 2015 specializing in creating sustainable gyms and wellness concepts through biophilic interior design. Over time that evolved into a fitness advisory business working with hotel groups and corporates around Europe to create innovative wellness concepts, gym facilities and fitness programs. This work also emphasized the importance of the built environment in promoting overall wellbeing.

Originally I thought I was setting up my own natural fitness studio in London but several successful pivots led me to where I am today!

In 2018 I set-up my second business, Biofilico focusing on a wider market of wellbeing interiors and healthy building services. This is much more closely aligned with the work I was doing for the mixed-use developer / operator before becoming an entrepreneur.

What advice would you give to someone hoping to become a biophilic designer or wellbeing interiors expert?

My path is not the only path clearly, other people may be coming from an engineering background, architecture or sustainability but to do this you really need to have a solid understanding of real estate, construction and how buildings are made.

Otherwise you’re going to struggle to put yourself in the shoes of your clients, to understand what their objectives are and how best to help them get there.

If you intend to be an independent consultant in biophilic design, wellbeing interiors, or indeed healthy buildings, you’ll need some certifications to show for it to, so studying for at least one if not several certification systems is a really good place to start. Certifications like WELL, LEED, and Living Future are essential for demonstrating expertise in biophilic design. Interior designers play a crucial role in integrating biophilic design concepts into interior spaces, significantly impacting mental health.

Additionally, biophilic design consultants often work alongside architects, engineers, lighting designers, acoustics consultants, and client representatives, emphasizing the collaborative nature of these projects.

Biophilic design research study for The Wardian - an EcoWorld Ballymore residential development in London’s Canary Wharf

What prompted you to do your own research studies into biophilic design and natural elements in London?

We were commissioned by a real estate developer called EcoWorld Ballymore to take over a space of theirs by the river in Canary Wharf, London’s business district for a 4-week residency.

We created a mini biophilic workspace in small glass building, turning it into a creative meeting room right by the water full of air-purifying plants to improve indoor air quality. We also integrated natural elements such as natural light, plants, and water to enhance the connection between the built and natural environments, creating a healthier built environment. A team from the University of Essex then created a scientific research questionnaire for us as a ‘before and after’ questionnaire for office workers during their visit to our ‘recharge room’ full of Vitamin Nature. (see the full report here)

In total 108 people spent about an hour in that biophilic green space designed for mental wellbeing, and we saw very positive results for key indicators such as productivity, creativity, nature-connectedness, stress and anxiety levels, even concentration.

So, a ‘recharge room’ or office ‘quiet space’ can become especially interesting when we layer in biophilic design as a way to give purpose and meaning to for example an unused office.

Maybe there is room for a little yoga and stretching in there too, or maybe not but let’s be clear - mental health in the workplace has never been more important than it is today.

This type of nurturing space in an office environment may seem a mismatch but in fact it can be a tangible help for HR departments looking to recruit and retain top talent by ensuring they have a happy and healthy workforce.

Biophilic Design and Wellbeing Interiors- an evolutionary perspective

A lot of the same principles are at the root of biophilic design, wellbeing interiors and healthy buildings. Here we explore the synergies between these distinct but ultimately complementary concepts.

Q. What is your personal background?

Matt Morley: I come from a real estate development background. I was a creative director for real estate developer for many years, from there grew a passion in what we could call healthy buildings or what's often described as wellbeing design in the real estate sector.

In parallel with that I was always heavily into nature and spending time outside and looking for natural alternatives to what I was doing indoors, so if we put that all into a shaker, the cocktail that comes out is this company Biofilico.

I started with gyms under the Biofit moniker, that remains a highly specialized business providing consultancy services to hotel groups and real estate businesses on creating green, healthy gym spaces with style.

It's a very niche market, but there's a market for it, and it's been growing steadily over the last five or six years I’m glad to say.

Q. How did you move into the workplace and residential sectors?

I noticed that there were adjacent categories where applying the same principles of how you to create a healthy building or biophilic space could be of value.

So I soon started working on office projects and more recently residential, as well as hotels.

Q: How do you think about healthy interior spaces?

For me it all goes back to our evolutionary history which is obviously so much longer and more extensive than the history we have of living indoors in centrally heated, air conditioned, electrically illuminated environments.

This post-industrial age is just a tiny blip in our evolutionary history over the last call it three and a half million years or 200,000 years if we're going back to the start of Homosapiens. No matter how you look at it, our ancestors spent a long ,long time surviving out in nature, that's our DNA, that’s what our genetic make-up is still equipped for but contemporary lifestyles are largely disconnected from that. For better or worse.

For me, that's where biophilic design comes by in trying to realign our indoor environments with the natural world and our evolutionary past.

Q: How do you define biophilia and biophilic design?

There are two versions for that. There's the version that you will read online that says either Eric Fromm or E.O. Wilson coined the term but for me all they were doing was giving a name to the innate connection that we all have as human beings to nature. They didn’t invent anything as such.

Biophilic design then takes that a step further by bringing it indoors, into the modern world and the realities of life today where we spend most of our time in some form of built environment.

When I talk about it I'm very much pushing the idea of biophilic design bridging two worlds, between green buildings and healthy buildings.

A lot of the work for LEED or BREEAM building certifications is focused on the environment while WELL and FITWEL building certifications zero in on the human aspect of buildings and interiors, the health and wellbeing side. Together, that gives us people and planet.

Healthy spaces are more to do with the people, the inhabitants or occupants and the users while the planet angle is more related to impact on raw materials, pollution, and so on, Biophilic design combines elements of the two, so a natural environment that is both healthy for the people who spend time in it but also healthy for the planet in terms of its impact on the world around us.

Biophilic design joins the dots between nature, human health and environmental wellbeing.

Q. What are the key principles of wellbeing design?

One key component is indoor air quality - here we are working to purify the air via enhancements to the ventilation system’s filters for example but it is also about the materials and finishes introduced into that space during the fit-out. Are they natural, non-chemical materials or are they materials containing plastics of chemical treatments for example, such as flame retardants?

There's a lot of interesting research out there about the mental aspect as well so if air quality is about physical wellbeing in one sense it is also a way to boost mental performance, through productivity and concentration levels. It is a way to improve how office workers perform during the day or how residents sleep at night. So producing in one sense and recovering in another, both linked to the indoor air quality.

Then we have light quality - having a connection to nature with a view out onto plants, greenery or a landscape will serve to exposure you to certain color spectrums of light at certain times of day. This can be supplemented with smart lights indoors that produce the ‘right kind’ of blue-white light during the day time before softening to a more amber tone towards the end of the day.

Philips Hue bulbs are great. I've been using them for a few years, but there are others out there now too. It's a relatively simple system, you don't have to have it set up to your Wi Fi network if you decide you want everything grounded and you want to avoid EMF risks, but that's a separate topic!

These lights serve as my alarm in the mornings so I wake with a replica of sunlight that slowly increases over a 30-minute period in what is hopefully my pitch black bedroom - to promote deep sleep and recovery.

Q: What air-purifying plants do you recommend?

It's relatively easy to find air-purifying plants that can be kept indoors with indirect light and they'll do a lot of good in terms of taking out the bad stuff, and pumping oxygen back into your home, for more Oxygen and less CO2.

Air-purifiers simply enhance and improve that same process, as plants can only do so much alone given the quality of inner-city air nowadays! The key is to go big, don’t hold back on your plant strategy, aim for six to eight plants per person in a room of say, 25m2

If you live in a remote location, if you're living in the middle of the woods or mountains, that's one thing. If you're in the middle of a city then I tend to hack that scenario a little bit with an air purifier running during the night. In other words, a combination of wellness tech and natural solutions is best.

In terms of plant species, my go-to species is the ‘ZZ’ plant as they're really resistant. They do a lot of good for you as well so I recommend those in your home especially.

For a home gym, garage gym or garden gym, space is probably limited so your floor space is at a premium, here I'm looking for low maintenance plants while keeping my floor space free for training activities like crawling, running, jumping, and so on. Generally, potted plants on the floor in your gym is a bad idea, especially if cats and dogs are in the mix as well.

Q: How do you use wabi-sabi design in wellbeing interiors?

This is a Japanese philosophy of finding beauty in imperfection. So imagine an organic apple, perhaps not the best looking, it may not be perfect but it is going to taste 100 times better than one that has been genetically modified to look ‘perfect’. The organic apple is full of vitamins and is far closer to an apple as nature intended it to be.

So wabi-sabi design can have a patina of age, curves instead of right angles, or a wobbly edge to a handcrafted ceramic plate for example.

Q: What healthy materials do you work with most often?

I always try to recommend a non-toxic, chemical and VOC-free paint for interior walls. There's this whole world of eco-friendly paints out there now, for example from the likes of Graphenstone or Lakeland, both fine examples of what is possible today from a sustainability perspective. Some paints can even absorb unwanted gases and chemicals that might be coming out of the plastics in your furniture.

Flooring is another key area to focus on for healthy materials. There's lots of high quality rubber and cork gym floor options out there that are generally much better than some of the cheaper flooring tile solutions, if natural wood, bamboo or stone is not within the realms of possibility budget-wise.

Q: What segments of the real estate market do you expect to see biophilic design impacting in future?

At the moment I'm looking at example at two different projects around the ‘senior living’ space. So, what I see is that post-COVID there's a huge spike in demand in advisory services on healthy materials as well as projects aimed at creating healthy indoor environments, and where better to do that than in a health clinic or residential development for seniors?

There are different concerns according to the specific project type but what makes it interesting is that they all join up and overlap in the end, at least in terms of my consultancy briefs.

Upcycled ocean-plastic fabrics in eco yacht interiors

this article first appeared in my BioBlu website here

How eco yacht designers can lead the way

There is fundamental change afoot in the yacht industry as awareness increases of the overall environmental footprint of the refit yards, ship builders and of course yachts combined all have.

As a sense of collective responsibility  in the face of climate change grows ever stronger, so will the demand for more eco-friendly alternatives for engine power, boat building materials, interior fit-out materials and even onboard operations.

Upcycled ocean-fabrics have a small but important role to play in this process, alongside natural and sustainably sourced fabrics such as organic cotton. The added value in an ocean-fabric based material though is that it has effectively already made a valuable contribution to cleaning the seas.

That journey from ocean plastic to yacht furniture upholstery may not have been straightforward but it is now very much a possibility, meaning the emphasis is on eco yacht designers and eco yacht brands in general to support such initiatives. Here's how...

Ocean clean-ups removing plastic from the oceans 

It is now easier than ever for businesses in the yacht industry to make a give back to Non-Governmental Organizations playing their part in cleaning and protecting the ocean in response to the estimated 12 million tonnes of plastic dumped into the oceans each year. Read that again.

Yes, that means each and every year. What's more, only around 9% of all plastic ever produced has been recycled, with a total of 400 million tonnes of plastic being produced globally each year according to the Seaqual Initiative (see below).

Examples of NGOs supporting ocean clean-ups include The Ocean Cleanup , PlasticBank and the ReSea project, amongst many others doing invaluable work in the sector.

Making the journey from ocean plastic to yarn

The Seaqual Initiative is based near Girona, Spain and acts as a loose community that connects ocean clean-ups around the world with waste management and recycling industries to transform marine litter into Upcycled Marine Plastic, which in turn can be used by manufacturers in their own fabrics, yarns or products.

In this sense at least, the Seaqual Initiative may not yet be on the radar of most eco yacht designers, and perhaps understandably so but their work represents a fundamental link in the often lengthy chain of organizations involved in this process.

Just imagine that PET water bottles may only be around 5-10% of the waste collected by fishermen, and even beach clean-ups only reach 40% of PET bottles, meaning the rest still needs to be sorted and dealt with in a responsible manner.

Manufacturing Upcycled Marine Plastic fabrics for interiors

UK manufacturer Camira's Oceanic range picks up the baton from the Seaqual Initiative's post-consumer recycled plastic yarn and turning it into a contemporary recycled polyester with a purpose. Each metre of the Oceanic fabric is made from 100% post-consumer recycled polyester including 50% Seaqual yarn, the equivalent of 26 plastic bottles per metre. 

The fabric is Certified to OEKO-TEX Standard 100 and Certified to Indoor Advantage™ "Gold", coming in a range of colourways with a natural inspiration, ideal for the onboard interior fit-out of an eco yacht.

BioBlu sees great potential in specifying Oceanic upholstery and others like it in an eco yacht interiors new build or refit project as a way to add a degree of Circularity, giving new life onboard an eco yacht to what was once discarded plastic waste destined to pollute our seas for many hundreds of years.

To find out more about BioBlu's interior consultancy services and our expertise in sustainable, healthy materials, contact Matt or Paolo at info @ bioblu.org or via the contact form here.

Biophilic design for green yachts

This article first appeared on my BioBlu website

Why use biophilic design on a green yacht?

Wellness, nature & sustainability

Biophilic design combines elements of sustainability and wellness with inspiration from the natural world, making it, in our view, an ideal solution for green yacht interiors and a unique selling point for the next generation of sustainable yachts.

So why has it made so little impact in the industry thus far? Perhaps partly this is due to lack of awareness amongst specialist yacht interior designers, or simply that an owner has a preferred style that differs from this more organic aesthetic. Current eco yacht certifications also do not currently cover materials, focusing instead on a yacht’s engine room carbon footprint.

The real opportunity here then is surely in leveraging biophilic design in the new generation of green yachts and, in future, being awarded by eco yacht certification systems for using the type of natural, sustainably sourced materials that are biophilic design’s trademark.

Another benefit for a green yacht with biophilic interiors is the added wellness benefits for the user, thanks to the healthy interior design strategies that we offer via our yacht consultancy services.

By leveraging the latest insights into healthy interiors, we create indoor spaces optimized for owner wellbeing, from deeper sleep, to greater concentration in a work area, reduced anxiety and improved mood. To achieve this our multi-sensory yacht interior concepts incorporate texture, lighting, sound and a sense of place – in this case inspired by the sea!

Blue nature on green yachts

Bringing the outside world in through nature-inspired design strategies that create harmony between onboard living areas and the ‘blue nature’ surrounding the yacht is a unique feature of biophilic design applied to the world of yachting.

Common strategies of biophilic design we might use on a green yacht interior include the use of fractal patterns, organic non-GMO fabrics, what the Japanese call ‘wabi-sabi’ finishes, the patina of age and generally a focus on honest materials in a neutral colour palette designed to create a restorative environment that is at one with the natural world outside.

Other design details integrating blue nature might include the use of marine materials in furniture fit-outs, for example dried seaweed embedded in an all-natural mattress, sustainably sourced seashells in a tabletop or a coral–inspired artwork full of textural detail.

A green yacht needs sustainable interiors

Adopting an environmentally-friendly approach to yacht interiors requires extensive knowledge of materials and their life-cycle. Thus far we have seen less uptake from the industry of this theme with energies focusing on the engine room and how to user cleaner energy forms to take the yacht from A to B.

Clearly this is fundamental and there remains a lot of work to do in this sense to go beyond the current diesel-hybrid engine solution. So as we collectively start to look ahead to what comes next for the yacht industry, the opportunity is to widen our collective scope to include not just the yacht’s engineering systems but also its interior fit-out and onboard operations.

Sustainability is a 360-degree picture, there is nowhere to hide. This can be daunting, even over-whelming for those without expertise in the field as the plethora of product and material certifications on offer, from Cradle to Cradle to the Declare Red List and beyond.

Our priority is to help guide a client to the right combination of form and function, keeping an eye firmly on the organic, natural, chemical-free, and recycled or upcycled materials.

To enquire about our green yacht interior consultancy services and biophilic design expertise, please contact us here to discuss your project. We are always open to collaboration!

Wellness Architecture for Healthy Buildings

The ‘Green & Healthy Places’ podcast series takes a deep-dive into the role of sustainability, wellbeing and community in real estate, offices, hotels and educational facilities.

Pati Santos is the Founder of The Good Thing, a new architecture practice focused on health & wellness in London, UK. Pati worked with world renowned landscape architects Lily and Charles Jencks for many years where she developed an interest in environmental psychology and biophilic design, eventually certifying in the WELL Building Standard and setting up her own practice.

wellness architecture with the good thing

Pati Santos is the Founder of The Good Thing, a new architecture practice focused on health & wellness in London, UK.

biophilic design & the well building standard

Pati worked with world renowned landscape architects Lily and Charles Jencks for many years where she developed an interest in environmental psychology and biophilic design, eventually certifying in the WELL Building Standard and setting up her own practice.

green buildings / healthy buildings

We discuss the distinction between design components and operational policies within the WELL system; the role of natural and toxin-free materials in creating green and healthy buildings, the potential of timber in constructing urban buildings, the connection between sustainability and wellness within a client's brief, the benefits of circadian lighting systems, the new WELL Health & Safety Seal as a response from commercial real estate to the Covid crisis and the shift toward healthier, greener homes equipped for both work and exercise.

to discuss collaborating with Biofilico on your next wellness interiors or biophilic design project, potentially with Pati as well (!) please contact us here

Biophilic Design for People, Planet and Profit

As the world becomes increasingly urbanized, lifestyle convenience and stimuli typically increase while access to nature and green spaces decrease. 

This represents a fundamental disconnect with our evolutionary history; biophilic design offers a time-proven solution to this contemporary challenge.

We define biophilia as the human love of or need for a close connection with nature and other forms of life.

When applied to modern lifestyles, ‘biophilic living’ is less about a return to hunter-gatherer times and is more to do with the respectful (re)integration of nature into our homes, offices, gyms, diets and beyond. 

The last two centuries have seen a massive process of urbanization as entire populations transition from low density natural environments to heavily built metropolises with limited access to greenery, open spaces, and wildlife. 

Simply put, biophilia and biophilic design are a modern response to that disconnect from nature.

It is an attempt to reunite indoor and outdoor worlds through the sensitive use of natural materials, shapes, breezes, colors, scents, and sounds in urban architecture and interiors.

THE TRIPLE BOTTOM LINE

The Triple Bottom Line (TBL) is a way of breaking down a business model by evaluating it from three different angles: human health, environmental sustainability, and financial gain - People, Planet, and Profit.

People: Measures social responsibility, what is a business doing to further the health and wellbeing of its customers, or users, and the community around it

Planet: Measures environmental impact, how is a business protecting or positively influencing the earth

Profit: Measures what is gained, and there needs to be financial gain in order for the business to survive and continue to do good for People and Planet

PEOPLE: SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY

Only more recently has there been emphasis placed on People in terms of our built environment. 

Current thinking however posits that buildings and interiors should not only be green but also healthy, actively contributing to the mental and physical wellness of its users, be they residents, office workers, patients or students

Biophilic design falls in line with this view, as people who spend time in biophilic spaces experience a plethora of benefits that extend to both physical and mental health. 

Here are a few noteworthy examples:

A BIOPHILIC HOSPITAL EXPERIMENT

A 1993 study by Dr. Roger Ulrich focused on biophilic design applied to various settings, one of which was a windowless, hospital emergency room. 

They traded blank walls and artificial furnishings for a design that aimed to connect people with nature through potted plants, furnishings made from natural materials, and a colorful wall mural of plants and animals in a Savannah-like setting. 

The result? A significant decrease in stress and aggressive behavior among patients, as well as improved recovery speeds of 8.5% compared with those facing brick walls. Multiply that small gain out over the entire healthcare system though, and the cost savings are considerable. 

Not only did the results of this study give us a glimpse of the power of a connection with nature, it showed that the positive impact can also be present when nature is indirect and merely representational. 

This simple biophilic design element is a potent way to improve the hospital experience—biophilic design doesn’t have to be difficult to be powerful. 

Hero offices Switzerland, Biofilico consultancy

A HEALTHY WORKPLACE

Hard evidence for the power of biophilic design in the workplace comes from a recent study undertaken by Professor of Organizational Psychology and Health Sir Cary Cooper entitled ‘Biophilic Design in the Workplace’ that surveyed a sample of 3600 office workers across Europe and the Middle-East. 

The results showed that office environments incorporating natural elements such as internal green spaces, natural light and an abundance of plants ensure higher levels of employee creativity, motivation, and wellbeing.

RECHARGE ROOMS

In an era filled with high-stress jobs and tech fatigue, recharge rooms are a growing trend in workplace wellness programs. Whether presented as somewhere for stretching and yoga, a quiet room for focused bursts of concentration and productivity, as a chill-out meditation space or even a games area, recharge rooms are somewhere for workers to — you guessed it—recharge their batteries during the workday. 

This can help lead to less stress, better productivity, more creativity, as well as better physical and mental health.

For more on Biofilico’s healthy office project for HERO Switzerland see this page.

PLANET: ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT

FITWEL, standing for Facility Innovations Toward Wellness Environment Leadership, was launched in March 2017 and has currently impacted over 250,000 building occupants with over 380 projects around the world. 

They take a data-driven approach with a database of over 3000 academic studies backing up their efforts to inspire healthier workplaces and residential communities specifically. 

Certification systems such as the US Green Building Council’s LEED have given architects and interior designers a clear structure and format to follow, as well as increasingly prestigious ratings that add tangible value for building owners (Profit) and their occupants (People) whilst reducing the impact of buildings on the environment

Hero offices Switzerland, recharge room by Biofilico

Buildings and interiors that respect the planet, doing no harm to the environment and in some cases even giving back, are often described with terminology such as green buildings or sustainable buildings. 

This approach—one that priorities concerns for nature—is literally built into the biophilic design value system. We love what nature can do for us, so we respect and protect her in return, it's a symbiotic relationship. 

One key insight here is that the materials chosen for an interior space will not only influence the final ambiance but also impact the users’ health and wellness, largely by avoiding materials that off-gas harmful toxins and Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs). 

Opting for materials that are natural and sustainable will help ensure that both a room’s users and the planet stay healthy. Good materials to consider in this sense include FSC wood, bamboo, linen, cork, and ceramic. 

Using organic material can lessen the presence of harmful chemicals that are regularly found in building materials and furniture—think benzene, formaldehyde, and trichloroethylene. 

PROFIT: RESPONSIBLE BUSINESS

Although organic design stretches back as far as the 30s, sustainable, eco-friendly buildings, and biophilic design in particular are concepts that have been introduced into mainstream design only over the past 20 years or so. 

As we have argued above however, the inspiration is simply to seek a more evolutionary concordant relationship with nature whilst living a 21st century existence.

OUTSIDE-THE-BOX GAINS: EMPLOYEE RETENTION

We’re seeing more and more biophilic design used by large companies dealing in billions of dollars of annual revenues and tens of thousands of highly qualified, highly sought-after knowledge workers, Why?

Employee satisfaction and office productivity are crucial in maintaining a competitive edge. Yes, these companies are intent on using responsible architecture and renewable energy sources but they are also exploiting the latest research that explores the intersection between neuroscience and biology. 

Other examples of ‘profit’ derived from biophilic design include: 

• Improved productivity & creativity for staff in the workplace

• Higher prices on real estate sales and hotel rooms with a view of nature

• Opportunity to improve brand image through the office environment

Conclusion

While it may be instinct to devote your focus purely to profits, turning some attention toward environmental efforts and social consciousness holds an arsenal of benefits—which often includes increasing profits.

Biophilic design is a way to tap into the power of not only nature, but of the 3 P’s: People, Planet, and Profit. And in time you will find that they often overlap and feed each other to cultivate a happy, healthy, and thriving business in today’s society.