Whether you live in the city or in the province, everyone would love a touch of nature inside your affordable house and lot despite the fact that technology and modern living have been giving us unlimited information richness and convenience. But in a world where fast-paced living is a norm, so do burnouts and high stress levels, which affect our mental health (and believe us when we say that a lot of us need sight refreshers so that we’d feel relaxed).
The answer of interior and house designers and architects is to come up with a blueprint design that allows us to reconnect with nature in a modern environment, and that is coming up with a biophilic design that can benefit not only our physical and mental health but also for fitness and survival health. It creates a bunch of long-term positive results, not just for the sake of aesthetics.
If you want to spruce up your living space with a natural environment to experience health benefits for you and your loved ones, then keep on reading because we’re here to tell you what Biophilic Design is all about!
What is Biophilic Design?
According to Stephen R. Kellert, author of the Biophilia Hypothesis, a person is biophilic if he/she has a love for nature. Having a biophilic design seeks out in using natural materials to create a harmonious and balanced sense of a modern built environment with a modern architectural design and the natural world.
It is the act of making a closer connection to nature through how buildings and landscapes are created and built and it fulfills our need to be one with nature as it centers around environments that humans have experienced, whether you want a full experience of being in a beach or forest without compromising natural resources and the frugal mindset that you can’t build a modern home somewhere natural.
There are two kinds of biophilic design: direct and indirect. The direct experience allows you to have an actual physical connection with natural light, air, plants, ecosystems, and the weather. Applying this to a building’s or a house’s design can be simple as putting up a vertical garden, some green walls, or designing the whole structure to fully interact with nature with natural ventilation.
On the other hand, having an indirect experience with nature can involve natural materials, geometrical and colorful organic shapes and forms that act as natural objects. This could be easy as using indigenous fiber and local wood for product designing or adding details that will make your space look like a still desert, a rocky cliff, or a couple of ripples of water.
Ways to Incorporate Biophilic Design into your Home
Open Your Windows
Show off your home’s natural features by bringing natural lighting into your home. It not only provides natural light and warmth to your home, but your circadian rhythms would also become healthy when you bring in the sun to shine on your home! You can think of spaces where sunlight moves easily across a room so that you can bask under the sun without having to go out or you can create cozy pockets with outdoor rooms such as backyards, patios, or decks so that you can create these spaces even if they’re tiny.
Bring Nature Inside
Bringing the outside in can be challenging especially when you’re dealing with a place that has closed spaces and no natural exposure to natural landscapes. But you can bring some natural elements to your place such as putting indoor plants, small green walls, and a simple water fountain to let us connect with nature. Natural patterns such as wood or stone can replicate your sensory experience with what nature can provide.
Play with Light and Shadow
When you play with natural light, you also have to be careful where you want it to shine as you don’t want to get blinded by the rays of the sun. You can map out the best times to let sunlight in and make shadows and you can also get to know your sun’s direction because it can get too hot while you work. Blur your boundaries and spend more time outside if you can so that you can make out the best times to let light in or to go out.
Create Prospect and Refuge
Enclosed spaces are places where we feel safe and secure, but it also defines how you look out until you feel comfortable again. So if you’re stressed and looking for somewhere to escape, go out and look for a spot with trees and with a roof or a shade to provide a perfect place for refuge while admiring natural sceneries.
Add In Natural Shapes and Forms
Natural forms and shapes give off the right angles. Nowadays, a lot of human beings invest in typical buildings because biophilic buildings are expensive due to their curvy shape and organic forms that we find in waves, flowers, and shells, and not every property can bring in natural forms. But natural patterns can be used decoratively as motifs as they are a powerful connection to the natural world.
Learn Order and Complexity
While every leaf has the same shape, they’re slightly different in size, and that goes with places too. You can contract straight lines and rectangles with complex and creative shapes such as geometrical patterns and fractals. Nature has order and complexity, so you should learn the art of balancing them in terms of design elements so that you can master the comfortability of a balanced space.
Biomimicry
Biomimicry is the act of mimicking nature’s processes and applying them to make everyday things. It’s been used to make glues that mimic the mussel shells’ durability to use shark skin for some fashion designs. It has a cultural and ecological attachment because many people reminisce about what it was like to live in a place where nature surrounds them and it makes them feel relaxed to see it in a built environment.
Spatial Variability
Having a deeper connection with nature when you’re inside will have a positive impact on your well being and it has various health benefits because it has many spatial experiences from meadows, forests, and mountains to beaches and it provides a variety of spaces for different moods and tasks. They can mimic spatial variability that is found in nature, so you can make the most out of your natural and safe corner.
Walking On Sunshine
If you think building a home is limited to closed spaces, there’s a thing called biophilic design where you can have minimal (or a lot of) things without compromising what Mother Nature has to offer. Either you can take the direct or indirect approach, you can experience biophilia by having a natural pattern for your interior design, combining shapes, lines, and sizes, having a green wall, some indoor and outdoor plants, and bringing nature indoors.
The benefits of biophilic design may reduce stress and have special healing powers, but it’s also a challenge to keep your place well-ventilated while allowing natural things to go into your place. You can opt to have transitional spaces, but having a free flowing place in a modern built environment is the ultimate test in balancing.
So if you’ve been wanting to go for a biophilic design, then this is that sign to expand your options for sustainability and go all in for Mother Earth.