Biophilia in healthy buildings
The role of biophilic design in healthy interiors
The real estate industry has increasingly shifted away from thinking exclusively about 'green buildings' and 'sustainable real estate', this has been a quiet revolution over the last 10-15 years towards building occupant wellbeing and human health as well, not replacing but rather extending the concept further. This then gives you a mix of Planet (green buildings) and People (healthy buildings).
Healthy, green and smart buildings
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 or a home or a building, or an entire community that is healthy, green and smart.
Benefits of Biophilia in real estate
For me at least, within that space of sustainability and wellbeing in buildings and interiors, there's been this massive shift towards integrating nature into an indoor environment, 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 nature, so biophilia or biophilic design brings the outside world back into our urban, indoor environments.
Biofilico started doing gyms and then branched out into co working spaces and business clubs and offices and now entire buildings, but really the focus there is combining elements of the eco friendly and sustainable, a consciousness about the impact we’re having on the planet, from the materials to the types of fabrics that we're bringing in, and how many plants are in there, and so on.
Nature = healthy interiors
What’s fascinating is that the natural is often the healthy too, so if you think about diet for example, the more natural and organic your ingredients the better the nutritional value. The same concept can be applied, in an abstract way, to our office and home environments.
You're seeing all of these Silicon Valley startups going big on biophilic design in their workplace wellness and employee engagement strategies for that same reason.
A lot of it's about giving something back to staff, not just doing less harm to the environment but actually giving something back to the people, to your employees who are spending time in the workplace every day by making it generally more pleasant and by implication a more productive for them to work in.
This approach helps with concentration levels too, it's been shown that if you can reconnect a little with nature during your work day rather than sitting in a white box all day long, then it actually helps to restore energy levels, it gives feelings of vitality.
Biophilic design research - health benefits
There's a lot of research out there around the positivity that a biophilic interior in your home or office can engender and so now we're seeing this happy balance in interiors today.
We’re looking for the science and the data to back all this up. That's where tech comes back into the discussion as we need to deliver functional benefits, so not just form and aesthetics but functional mental and physical health benefits.
Like any good interior design it all needs to look good whilst having minimal impact on the environment, plus we are aiming for tangible improvements in emotional and physical wellbeing for the occupiers of the space in question, be it an office, a home or even a gym.
Well building certifications
In the same way that you have your star ratings for hotels, when you're dealing with a workplace, there hasn't really been any standardized system in terms of ensuring that there is adequate consideration taken for workplace wellbeing, or generally creating a healthy environment for workers.
The green building movement did that to an extent, via certifications like LEED and BREEAM and various others all around the world. Then came the wellness certification rating systems such as WELL, FITWEL and RESET. More recently we've seen the emergence of smart building certifications, the one I use is WIRED SCORE.
They really go in and just make sure that everything within that building or workplaces is set up so that it is future proofed so that can you can effectively integrate tech into your facilities management system, a lot of it then goes into the FM facilities management, and you're then looking for efficiencies in terms of how a building is operated so that you're reducing energy expenditure at lower times of usage, when there's less occupancy in a space, whether it's an office or hotel or, or an entire building and creating a more touchless environment so that most things can be done and delivered via an app or via technology instead of old school manual options.
What is indoor air quality in the context of a healthy building?
Indoor air quality data comes down to your air quality monitors, Biofilico is certified in RESET AIR - a protocol for installing certain types of high-grade monitors in certain locations around a building or interior space, ensuring the data is delivered to the RESET cloud for ongoing analysis, you then have a lot of alarms that go off if anything looks unusual, you can overlay that data with occupancy data and start to see if there's something happening in this meeting room because they've been in there for four hours without a window open and there’s a problem with the ventilation, for example.
Wellness tech is now allowing us a real time view of the healthy credentials of a space. Yes it requires a modest investment upfront on behalf of the building owner or the tenant, but really once you're set up you provide support for your guests, customers, occupants or residents, giving them reassurance that you're taking their health to heart and that it's a priority.
When you look at the costs of staffing and rent, a minor increase in healthy interior enhancements can really make a tangible difference, especially to productivity rates. People are breathing fresher air, they're more likely to be do quality creative work. It's no longer about putting hours in at your desk in a specific, dedicated corner of the office, it's about how much can you produce and what quality work can you produce around the building, , moving between areas as needed to adapt to the type of work you are doing at any one time during the work day.
Biophilic design in building certification standards
Biophilic design is less an alternative than an integral component of the green building and healthy building movements. So if you're looking at LEED or BREEAM, there are components within them both that give credit or recognition for integrating elements of biophilic design, such as landscaping, gardens, views of nature, plant walls, and so on.
Biophilic design is a strategy that we use to not just tick boxes but to deliver value and enhancements to a space and what's interesting about it that is straddles both worlds, the green and the healthy, wellbeing design and sustainable design. So that same strategy can be applied to both of those two different types of certification standards and you gain credits for both.
Lighting strategies in healthy buildings
There's been some real revolution in lighting systems over the last few years. 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, then you say okay how can we enhance wellbeing through smart lighting systems and really you get into color therapy, there, playing with the light spectrums on offer at different times of day to connect with our innate circadian rhythm.
So thinking about, say, a brighter blue white light. In the mornings, which is when the sun is high as we're getting up to the middle of the day and then towards the end of the day, a softer, more Amber yellow or orange hue, and removing all the blue white lights later at the end of the day so we're not disrupting sleep patterns.
How many of us have spent days in offices with these 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 it's hard to switch off! A different type is more appropriate after dark, especially in winter.
How does Biofilico apply these concepts to a home setting?
A typical project might be an 8-story mixed use real estate development in London or the health and fitness offer for entire hotel. At a larger scale, I'm part of a team and there's mechanical engineer consultants, architect studios and interior design teams involved as well..
Recently though, we’ve applied this thinking to Can Ikigai in Barcelona, Biofilico’s home base, with a home gym set-up, a biophilic home office and a wabi-sabi organic interior concept design. This has meant applying some of the knowledge that we have from healthy buildings and wellness in the workplace to a residential context.
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