An introduction to biophilic design and wellbeing interior concepts
What is a green building vs a healthy building?
The real estate industry has increasingly shifted away from thinking exclusively about 'green buildings' and 'sustainable real estate' in what has been a quiet revolution over the last 10-15 years towards building occupant wellbeing and human health, extending the concept further to give a mix of Planet (green buildings) and People (healthy buildings).
What role do smart buildings play?
Aligned with that, we are increasingly looking at smart buildings too, so 'healthy, green and smart' are becoming the holy trinity of high performance real estate today in other words.
Thinking about a workplace, home, building, or an entire community that is healthy, green and smart means we have three possible levers to play with. Let's leave the smart slightly to the side for now.
Biophilic design in wellbeing interiors
When we're thinking about wellbeing interiors, there's been this massive shift towards appreciation for integrating nature into an indoor environment, a concept now typically referred to as biophilia, which is really just our innate connection to to the natural world and how increasingly urban environments, come with their own risks because we end up disconnected from where we came from.
Biophilic design brings the outside world back in. I started doing gyms and then branched out into coworking spaces, business clubs, offices and now entire buildings. The focus there is combining elements of both eco-friendly and sustainable interiors that are conscious of how an indoor environment’s materials, fabrics, plant count and so on can also affect occupant wellbeing.
What's fascinating is that the natural and organic are inherently healthy, just think about diet for example. So natural positioning for a brand or office interior in a Silicon Valley tech company is a fundamental piece of their workplace wellness and employee engagement strategies. Not not just doing less harm to the environment but actually giving something back to your people, to your employees who are spending their days there.
What are the benefits of biophilic design in the workplace?
Besides making just about any interior space more pleasant and uplifting, biophilic interior designers can make a workspace more productive for workers, helping with concentration with views onto nature, be it direct or indirect, living or a representation of nature in other words. Both work, as it turns out!
Biophilic spaces also foster feelings of vitality and by being connected to nature during the work day the research shows it promotes overall positivity. We also look for data, tangible results that highlight the impact of such biophilic design interventions, it’s not enough to rely o aesthetic improvements alone, we’re after functional health improvements here.
What data or science is there behind biophilic design’s benefits?
That's where the tech piece loops back in, increasingly all of this needs to be data driven and/or scientifically backed, delivering functional health benefits. One area of particular interest is indoor air quality, previously this was wrapped up in the wide-ranging healthy building certifications such as WELL Standard and Fitwel. Now though, we’ve seen dedicated air quality standards coming onto the market such as RESET AIR. This is a real sign of the times and holds the key to more widely available data around indoor air quality.
When you're dealing with a workplace, we don't have a standardized system of rankings for how healthy a space it is. The green building movement did make some progress in that sense, with certifications like LEED and BREEAM and various others all around the world starting the process off.
how do smart building certifications fit into this?
More recently we've had smart certification systems come into the market; I tend to use WIRED Score. They go in and make sure that everything within that building or workplace is future-proofed so that you can effectively integrate tech into your facilities management system, opening the door not just to high connectivity but also energy efficiencies, invaluable building usage data, and so on.
Air quality monitors produce data every hour that can be analyzed online and set-up to send alarm notifications whenever there is a change in air quality in a particular space, for example if something doesn’t look right in a particular meeting room because it has been full of workers for four hours straight and the ventilation system has started to play up. Technology gives us a real time view of the health credentials of a space, no matter its function.
Yes, there is a modest cost to all of this but once you're set up I think you then get into discussions around providing support for your occupants, guests or customers. You’ve made health a priority. Another tangible output is often productivity rates and less low-level anxiety.
Work doesn’t need to be about putting hours in at your desk in a specific corner of the office, it's about how much can you produce and what type of space(s) do you need to do your best work, adding value to the company’s bottom line in the process?
Does biophilic design have its own wellness building standard?
Biophilic design is a part of building standards such as LEED or BREEAM for example, there are components within them that give credits or recognition for integrating elements of biophilic design so rather than being a separate standard it appears as a feature, or a design strategy that we use to not just tick boxes on a standard’s check list but to deliver tangible aesthetic enhancements to an interiors space.
So in a sense, biophilia sits between the two worlds of green and healthy buildings, with wellbeing interior design on one side and sustainable design on the other. In other words, if I create a biophilic office or biophilic gym for example for a project pursuing LEED or WELL, it would secure points for both standards.
what about wellness lighting?
There has been real revolution in lighting systems over the last few years, and so there's a few different ways of looking at it one would be to say, okay, how can we, first of all, reduce energy expenditure with the lighting? That’s the easy part, we've been doing that for a little while now.
Then it becomes, ‘how can we enhance wellbeing through our lighting choices?’ That’s where smart lighting systems, exposure to natural daylight, even color therapy come in. It’s all about the spectrum of light we use, that affects our energy levels basically.
From a biophilic design perspective, I take inspiration from ancestral health practices, with a brighter blue-white light in the mornings and into the middle of the day, then softer, more amber hues or yellow and orange with no blue at all after dark. That means no TV and no bright halogen overhead lights please otherwise it disrupts sleeping patterns, that then results in decreased energy levels the next day, and we all know what feels like.
We see hotels engaging with that concept but workplaces are only really just catching on. How many of us have spent entire days in offices with intense blue-white halogen lights above us from nine o'clock in the morning until nine o'clock at night, then you go home and guess what, it's hard to switch off despite being tired!
If it’s dark at 5pm in winter, consider a task lamp on your desk combined with a softer uplighter on a wall or a standing lamp with a dimmer option. We want energy levels not to drop but we also need to protect the quality of our sleep once the work is done. It’s not that complicated really once you work it out.
how do you apply your knowledge to residential projects now?
I'm often dealing in quite large-scale projects, so it might be an eight-story mixed-use real estate development in London, an entire hotel or various fitness rooms and gyms in a health centre. When I have scale, I'm part of a team working alongside engineers, architects even interior design studios. Over the last year though I've been at home and so my challenge has been to take some of this big picture thinking and apply it to my own little world of a home office environment with wellbeing interiors and biophilic design principles.
I've created a home gym space as well as a home office in fact, applying the knowledge gained from commercial or hospitality projects and converting them into a residential context. What happens when you apply those ideas to your home environment where you now spend a lot more time than you did before?!
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