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.