My whole outlook on design was transformed last summer when I took up residence in a little boutique hotel. Its stylish lobby hinted at what was to come, with its natural yet utterly sophisticated look, which seamlessly blended the outdoors with the indoors. Straightaway, I was struck by the skylight’s bountiful natural light, shining on various houseplants and the forms and textures of stumps, thin trees, and the wooden core of the hotel’s tree inside. They advised in the leaflet about even more “natural habitats” restful nooks, basically interspersed throughout the floors above.
Designing for biophilia is about making spaces in which people want to spend time, feel good, and have their moods lifted. The aim is to forge stronger and often more attractive environments that enhance our health and experience. Having the living world in our space closes a gap that’s often found in poorly conceived retreats that, however comfortable, just aren’t places you’re likely to feel much better after merely being near them.
Common to most (good or effective) biophilic design projects, be they for hotel lobbies, guest rooms, or the underpasses of train stations are a few fundamental themes and principles.
The Essentials of Biophilic Design.
The concept that people have an inborn tie to the natural world is the foundation of biophilic design. This idea strongly infers (and research tends to support the notion) that if natural elements are included loosely or inherently in our constructed milieu, the effect is salubrious. Biophilic design has many tantalizing upsides that are seemingly just coming to light. As we delve into the details of what biophilic design is and the key principles and components that drive this concept, we may become utterly flabbergasted at the multitude of ways that nature can be snuck into our personal and public environments.
The Impact of Sunlight and Scenery
Research indicates that daylight and outside views have a real and measurable impact on human beings in terms of maintaining the overall well-being of physical and mental health. They have an actual effect on people’s moods – quite literally, making them feel better—often to a degree that renders artificial equivalents superfluous. This is more than just a nice theory. It’s backed up by a wide variety of studies.
Biophilic design places a high value on natural lighting, and for good reason. Natural light from the sun doesn’t just make a space look good; it’s also been proven to benefit our mental and physical health. For one thing, it improves our mood. For another, it helps regulate our body’s natural clock. And what’s more, it stands to reason that if you’re building a structure meant to look and function like it’s part of the natural world, then you should use the kind of warm, direct light that’s found in nature. The next time you’re in the park, the Miesian plaza, or the tall grass, pay attention to how the light’s falling on you, it’s doing some fantastic stuff.
A few years back, I visited a seaside resort that they truly knew how to utilize Mother Nature’s light. They sat atop a cliff and there were no real obstructions. You could look out at the ocean for miles and miles. My room (like all the others) had wonderful big windows and a significant other that let plenty of sunlight in. You could wake up in the morning at the sound of the waves and “almost feel like a Disney princess, with the sun shining in and seemingly lighting up the room from every angle.”
The Innate Qualities of Materials and Textures
Using natural elements like wood, stone, and plants, designers can create a sense of coziness, comfort, and invitation that is inherent in the feeling we get from being in a natural environment. … Each of these elements carries its own colors and patterns making up what we can refer to as a truly harmonious and textured space that somehow seems very close to (the often-idealized version of) the natural environments that we humans can inhabit.
During a trip to the mountains, I found a little restaurant that seemed right at home nestled among the peaks. It was a small place, run by a family. When you walked inside, you felt as though you were walking into a room in a cabin straight out of a storybook. The wooden decor and the stone walls of the interior really emphasized that cozy, intimate feeling of being all bundled up and warm on a cold night. It was one heck of a fireplace away from being a perfect place seen only in a heartwarming commercial.
Components of Water
The tranquil effect of water can make a space seem more pleasant and enjoyable to our senses. Even the smallest tabletop fountains can create a private space, focused on relaxation, in any corner of a hotel room or office. At the other end of the spectrum, a water wall can become a focal point of a stadium’s suite or the lobby of a public building. Moreover, a soothing ambiance isn’t the only “plus” associated with using water as a design material. Water in an indoor environment also humidifies the air, and that’s good to air quality, too.
On a work trip to a busy metropolis, I lodged at a hotel featuring a magnificent indoor waterfall in its atrium. The soft noise of falling water was just the thing to soothe the nerves after a day in the city. This peaceful alcove in the heart of an urban landscape was the perfect representation of the almost magical effect of biophilic design.
In the hospitality industry, biophilic design is becoming more and more popular. For those unfamiliar with the concept, “biophilia” refers to our innate tendency, as humans, to seek connections with the natural world. This idea was popularized by Harvard biologist, Edward O. Wilson, in the late 20th century when he also proposed that there was a Biophilia Hypothesis. Hotel developers and other nuts-and-bolts people in the hospitality industry are adopting Wilson’s idea and creating plans for how an urban hotel created in a high-rise can still permit the natural experiences he talks about in his book.
The hospitality industry thrives when it cultivates an atmosphere of true calm and coziness. Increasingly, hotels and resorts that want to create such memorable ambiences for their guests work with a design concept called biophilia. This is the idea that human beings have an innate tendency to seek connections with nature and other forms of life. Applying this concept to the design of hospitality environments can help guests feel at ease, especially in settings where creating fond memories matters a lot.
Establishing Peaceful Sanctuaries
When using biophilic design, hotels are moving beyond just being an indoor space that serves as a temporary stop for their guests. Instead, they are creating restful, calming spaces that look inviting, so you would want to hole up there and forget for a little while the life you left outside the hotel doors. Indoor gardens, thick carpets of green plants maximize your impression of being surrounded by nature; views “pull” you in and create a pleasing perspective. Many layers of plants, set against a soothing palette of natural materials and colors, yield spaces where you may feel enveloped by nature.
One of the most unforgettable hotel stays I’ve had was at a wellness retreat set within a forest. The whole “resort,” if you could call it that, was designed to melt into its natural landscape. And could you ever call something that juts out of a landscape, the way a resort does, a “natural” architectural and not intrusive presence? Ms. White and Mr. Heid detail these particularly well. My room, for one, had far too many large, broad windows not to have any window treatment get in the way of those unretreat-like views. The icing on the cake? The small, but nonetheless FABULOUS “trust-your-senses” indoor botanical garden rising up in a variety of bay windows within the resort’s lobby.
Improving the Comfort of Our Guests
In hospitality, the biophilic design isn’t meant only for pleasant visuals; it’s also for fortifying the guest’s well-being. This design may wrap service floors around outdoor courtyards, like the recently redone Miami Beach Convention Center, or pull a hotel’s outdoor pool and bar area right up against the ground-level rooms. Either way, the design places guests in contact with the outdoors.
Another hotel I went to put guest welfare first and foremost. That hotel had a rooftop garden, not only for show but for a good bit of the guest experience, too. They held yoga classes there high above the everyday hotel experience below. Guests could go there to relax or do yoga amid the natural experience of the rooftop. When it came to light in the rooms, my favorite half of the new hotel experience came alive. The other half was the great sleep experience to follow.
The Biophilic Design in Retailing
When retail spaces adopt biophilic design, they make themselves more appealing to customers. This is not just a matter of aesthetics; using natural elements in a store environment is good for business. It makes customers feel good, and when customers feel good, they are likely to spend more time in the store. In a recent study, 91% of retailers worldwide reported that sales had increased after they had optimized various elements within their stores.
Making Welcoming Places
An ever-growing number of retailers are coming to understand just how crucial it is to design not just a store, but a really compelling space that pulls the customer in and almost inescapably draws them towards making a purchase. “Experience” is the watchword for the kind of store today’s customer seems to demand, and retailers are using everything in their arsenal from skylights and full-spectrum light bulbs near the entrance to indoor trees and more and more common, open layouts.
Not long ago, I paid a visit to a small local shop that had taken the full plunge into something called biophilic design. It was just like being outside, which is lovely and often not the case when one is, you know, inside a building. Even the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) lauds biophilic design for what you’d expect—a boutique that capitalizes on the part of the indoor experience that most of us like: being flooded with natural light and being surrounded by plants and trees. Biophilic design is the next level up; it’s more heard of now than ever and slowly seeping into commercial spaces.
Improved Customer Experiences
The customer experience can be greatly improved by biophilic design, which makes a place more comfortable and enjoyable by imitating nature. And how can that be done, you may ask? You can do a lot, really! You can fill a room with natural sound from a place where water is rushing over a small weir. You can make sure there’s natural light. Or, if you have to make do with LED light, at least make it so that when it’s coming from the right height and angle and with the amount of light that can occur in nature, it’s “making spaces look as good as natural light does.” In other words, biophilic design, even though it may sometimes seem a little hokey, is also really good at appealing to one’s senses of sound, smell, and touch in a way that’s both pleasing and relaxing and also good in a utilitarian way for letting a customer see the object in its best light.
The high-end department store I recently visited seemed to have embodied this concept thoroughly. It had spaces set aside for customers to sit and relax. These areas were almost like indoor gardens, where one could almost forget that one was there to shop and how else to put it?—to spend money. Yet the store felt luxurious and, in a word, beautiful.
Advocating for Sustainability
Design that embraces the love of life and nature-mimics patterns, too often pairs with sustainability. The deeper pull toward biophilic design may come from the prospect of the death of nature as we know it. The pairing has some basis in science. Ecologists from a range of backgrounds have begun to explore in detail something long suspected but not often directly studied: whether experiencing nature can change people’s brains and behavior for the better.
The local organic grocery store that I often go to has instilled several smart and environmentally friendly design elements. To start, the store was built using reclaimed materials. It’s lit using energy-efficient lighting, and the entire store is definitely “energized” by all those series of awesome events happening there. And that’s exactly the point of the National Biophilic Cities Challenge, which is a Cities Biophilic Design Moth Month sort of challenge. Even if you didn’t attend their recent webinar, which I did, you can always listen to the podcast or read the interview and view the slides.
Personal Tales of Change
The best way to appreciate the impact of biophilic design is to hear the personal stories of the design experience. The narrative of a design project that embraced the need to bring in the outdoors was key to a retail store’s successful transition to a hospitality experience.
A Hotel that Rejuvenates and Restores
A really tense time at work made me realize I was in desperate need of a vacation to hit the reset button. I do a lot of biophilic design, so I looked for a hotel that also does. Stepping into the lobby of the hotel filled me with a sense of immediate calm. When I got to my room, I was met by a beautiful garden view, since my room was on the ground floor and also part of the garden. The natural materials and the colors used gave such a warm and inviting room that it felt more to me like I was in my own kind of cozy nest than in a “non-place.” Now, don’t get me wrong. Biophilic design in architecture is not like the smell of Mom’s apple pie. But I’ll tell you, it really was better than the telephone pole I used to stare at when I was in the third grade and we were going through the early 1900s in our history books.
An Uplifting Store Encounter
I was thoroughly inspired when I visited a retail concept store that was a true poster child for biophilic design. The space was clearly created to feel like nature indoors. It accomplished that through the use of plants and all manner of living æsthetic and corners of the store, which designed to imitate and allude to a real garden or wild space. It was pleasing to look at in all the most immediate and accessible ways that we perceive natural environments as “relaxing,” and it felt like being inside a real, well-lit “living space,” with a very liberal and broad use of natural materials.
Uniting All Factors
The realm of the hospitality and retail industry can effectually be transformed by the potency of biophilic design. Tips, propitious for yielding the sort of setting that ineluctably pulls our species toward it, are here in plenty. The following have not been concisely packed into a list but instead loosely ride along the incessant flow of narrative prose that stays true to the focus of the spotlight.
1. Let in the Sun: Buildings fill with natural light when they’re equipped with large windows, skylights, and glass doors. This is even better when a space doesn’t have much of an outdoor view because the light itself supplies a pleasant, bright, and inviting atmosphere. Bonus: Natural light is fairly universal (reachable from just about any point on the globe), free, and nontoxic.
2. Bring in Greenery: You can use potted houseplants, indoor trees in the space, and even consider creating a living plant wall. Elaborate plant-based decors can do more than just artistic landscaping and offer you a serene green space with awesome benefits, foremost of which is the improvement of indoor air quality to say the least.
3. Employ Natural Materials: Your design can really start to sing when you add natural elements like wood, stone, and bamboo. But it’s not just using the materials—it’s knowing which ones add the right touch of warmth and texture that truly allows the color to resonate in a space. Colorado Rockies. A snowy day at the ballpark. Your favorite song. You really hear and feel the individual notes when all of the warmth and texture are allowed to come forth from the materials.
4. Cultivate Indoor-Outdoor Alliances: Where you can, form indoor-outdoor junctions. Connections between the indoor and the outdoor can be very nice platforms; we can think of Hoffmann House by Ludwig Wittgenstein with a very nice patio, for instance, or think of a balcony—again, if it’s feasible, like some kind loft space. Or think of windows that are not just windows looking at something, but windows that are part of the pre-reflections.
5. Sensory Engagements: Consider how the components of your design might engage all of our human senses. Using natural elements can help take this a step further. For instance, if we incorporate the sounds, scents, and textures of the journeys we are simulating, our audiences can take brief imaginative excursions to new destinations when they view, touch, or even sniff our designs.
6. Push for Sustainability: Think about how you can use sustainable practices in your work. That might be selecting environmentally friendly materials, for instance, or it might be working with energy-efficient lighting.
Adopting Biophilic Design
The biophilic design is not just modern parlance; it is a calling back to the basics—a reacquaintance with the forms, structures, and patterns inherently produced by nature. And what better way to integrate the natural into the built environment than with an industry that society spends so much time and dines within: hospitality. Biophilic design in hospitality, using plants mostly, can go beyond just the look inside a hotel or restaurant; with benefits for employers, employees, and customers, the experience of biophilic design environments can offer a swath of positive effects for many people at once. That is its power.
If you’re putting together a motel, a serviceable diner, or even a mom-and-pop kind of retail joint (let alone anything grander), you might want your lodgers, coffee drinkers, customers, or, uh, parolees to feel at ease and like the place has a natural rhythm and hand. The vision of biophilic design, its necessity, naturalism, and range of transformative possibilities is well served by this week’s guest speaker and author.
Why not adopt biophilic design in your place? You can begin by using natural light, plants, and earthy substances. See if the straightforward savviness of this approach can change the life of your space and also yours on the side. You already possess living rooms that put nature on a pedestal and highlight its artfulness. We all can design like that.
