Biophilic design, or adding nature and sustainability into your home, is an excellent way of adding natural elements and grounding your home decor design that connects with the world around you.
Home decor designs are always changing, and with a renewed desire for consumers for all things sustainable, biophilic design is resurging.
If you’re looking for ways to incorporate a more natural vibe into your home, there has never been a better time to find and utilize natural and sustainable products to give it a healthier, more calming ambiance.
These tips can help you to create a living environment that welcomes and embraces nature to bring a positive energy back to your home.
Let Fresh Air In
Letting fresh air into your home enables you to let nature in and improve air quality (location-dependent). Fresh air can be a wonderful tonic for clearing the mind and revitalizing the body. It also boosts the immune system, increases energy levels, and even boosts your mood. Plus it can also get rid of any lingering germs or allergens present in your ohme especially if you have an air purifier too.
A great and easy way to bring the outdoors in is to simply open the windows and doors and let that fresh air flow through your home.
Increase Natural Light
Again, another simple and easy option for invoking the natural vibe of your home’s environment is to let in as much natural light as possible. This can be opening curtains, removing barriers to windows such as large pieces of furniture or ornaments blocking windows, and even foliage outdoors.
The more natural light you get in your home, the more sunlight can penetrate the windows, and the more vitamin D you will be exposed to.
Plus, natural light helps to regulate the body’s circadian rhythm, meaning it can give you a better night’s sleep, it can boost your mood and your energy levels, and help lower your energy consumption as you don’t need to turn on lights to illuminate rooms that are flooded with natural light.
If your home is on the darker side, you can look into options for increasing windows or making changes to the structure to help you increase natural lighting options, i.e., adding skylights or roofing spaces or incorporating floor-to-ceiling windows on the part of the property where you get the most sunlight or adding an orangery at your home.
You can also use lighter paint on the walls or hang mirrors opposite windows to reflect more light into the room.
Use Natural Materials
As much as possible, use as many natural materials in your home decor as possible. This means using products such as cotton, hemp, rattan, wood, stone, bamboo, and cork, to name a few, to add natural elements and accents to your home.
From adding Solid Oak Shelves to your walls to cotton furnishings, stone flooring, jute rugs, and rattan furniture, there are a multitude of different products made from natural materials that you can incorporate into your home to help you create your biophilic design goals and help you increase sustainability and add some nature to your home.
Use Natural Shapes
If you’re looking for an understated way of adding natural elements to your home design, then looking at the shapes most commonly found in nature can help you to do just that: get rid of sharp, harsh lines and look for softer, rounder edges that will mimic nature within your home environment.
Think round items, curved edges, items with minor imperfections such as natural markings in the wood you use to retain its natural beauty and character, or using marble or stone and keeping any imperfections visible to help you replicate how you would find it in its authentic and original form.
Think soft and relaxed, gentle and flowing in your design, and this will help you pull everything together and create a seamless biophilic design that embraces nature and gives you a soothing and calming vibe within your home.
Use Natural Scenes
Use products or artwork within your home to depict scenes that you would find outside in the world. Think of recreating beachy scenes using products that can resemble the beach and the water, create woodland vibes using leaf prints, artwork, or plant displays to emulate the open air using blues and whites to create a scene that is similar to open air.
You can pull different items together to recreate the scene you are going for, or you can use wallpaper, murals, artwork, or use your furniture to help you set the scene.
Soft Hues and Light Paint Colours
The colors you use within your home play an integral part in a biophilic home decor design. Essentially, you want to use the colors you would find outdoors in nature, and this means you want soft greens and blues, natural colors, browns, creams, whites, and fresh colors that are depicted in nature around you.
This can be choosing a wallpaper design that uses greens and whites to create a plant life scene on the walls or painting the walls and ceilings in one color using color drenching to help open up smaller rooms and give the illusion of light and space. Pay attention to how and where you use color as different colors can impact your mood and some are more suited to certain parts of the home than others. As are bold and vivid patterns or more intense designs you opt for that also tie your decor scheme together.
Add Plants
If you want to bring nature indoors, one of the best ways to do this is to add plants and flowers to your home. Plants are scientifically proven to help you boost your mood and are instantly calming and relaxing. So, not only do they serve a more aesthetic purpose, but they can be extremely beneficial to your health, too. Plus, some plants are thought to have air-purifying properties, which is another bonus.
However, if you’re not green-fingered and are likely to kill your plant life rather than nurture it, you can opt for artificial varieties instead. While these will still have the same mood-boosting properties, they won’t have the same health benefits as natural plants, but they are an excellent substitute.
You can add plants to pots standing on the floor, adorning shelving, you can create a living wall both internally and externally, add living artwork or you can hang them from the ceiling. There are multiple options for adding greenery to your home and so many more benefits.
Incorporate Water
Water sounds can be soothing and help you to increase relaxation within the home if this is something you enjoy listening to. Ideally, you can incorporate ponds and water fountains outdoors that you can listen to outside. Or you can add in fountains indoors or small water features around your home that can help you to bring the soothing sounds of nature and water into your home.
Adding a biophilic design to your home all depends on what you are looking for within it. In the first instance, you need to take a step back and look at the design of your home, what you can accommodate, and what your home will lend itself to.
From here, you can create mood boards for Pinterest boards to find the right products and materials for your home and to inspire you. Then, you can identify the changes you can make and slowly build up from what you currently have until you reach your goal decor scheme.
Use a mix of patterns, textures, natural colors, and materials that allow you to pull everything together. Don’t be afraid to experiment to find out what works for you and brings your home to life in the most natural way possible.
