Holistic Interior Design: Home Design for Your Well-Being
Over the past few decades, studies have shown that the spaces we inhabit have a significant impact on our health and well-being. For that reason, many interior designers have begun taking a more holistic approach to home design, with a greater emphasis on how a room feels as opposed to just how it looks.
Holistic interior design, also called wellness design, aims to create a space that helps to nurture our mind, body, and soul. Read on to learn all about holistic design and what it means to have a home with healthy, sustainable spaces that are better for our wellness and the world around us.
We’ll also share some before and after pictures that show you just one example of how a holistic interior design approach can produce some truly beautiful results.
What Is Holistic Interior Design?
Holistic interior design is an approach to creating a positive environment that promotes the mental, physical, and spiritual health of the people who will be using that space.
In the same way that holistic medicine evaluates and treats the whole person, holistic design considers and creates spaces for the whole person—mind, body, and spirit—so they can maintain optimal wellness at home.
Holistic home design combines color psychology, human biology, biophilic design, ergonomics, sustainability, and other principles to promote the health and well-being of a home’s inhabitants.
The ultimate goal of holistic interior design is to make you feel comfortable, safe, happy, and healthy at home. It means designing to create spaces that promote harmony and balance. This might mean an improved layout for the room, choosing furniture with soft instead of hard corners, improving the natural light in a space, or selecting a color scheme that is more calming.
How to Create Healthy Spaces with Well-Being in Mind
When the holistic design process is done right, it can enhance your mood, lower your blood pressure, improve your sleep, filter the air you breathe, reduce your impact on the environment, and provide many other benefits to your mind, body, and soul.
Below are a few examples of how you can use a holistic approach to interior design to help improve your physical and mental health:
Eliminate the clutter: When you own just the right number of items, it can reduce stress and promote a sense of calm. Get rid of things you’re not using, and make sure everything that’s left has its own place and space.
Bring some nature inside: You can benefit from bringing some natural elements into your home design. For example, wood flooring will make you feel more grounded in your environment, and many houseplants can filter the air you breathe.
Add some natural light: Sunlight is a well-known mood-lifter, so the more light a space has, the happier you will feel. Painting walls a lighter color and adding some mirrors can also bring a sense of more light to a room.
Spatial planning for better flow: You can reorganize furniture to create floor plans that improve traffic patterns in your home. You can also add softer materials to your environment to reduce noise and help calm your nervous system.
Block light in bedrooms: Having a dark room is important for quality sleep. Use window treatments that don’t let light leak in help ensure a peaceful sleep with no distractions.
Use sustainable materials: Select flooring, furniture, and paints that are better for the environment and healthier for the humans and pets living in the home. This means choosing natural materials, sourcing items locally, and checking labels for harmful toxins such as VOCs (volatile organic compounds).
What Does It Mean to Create Spaces That Are Sustainable?
A sustainable home is intentionally designed to have the smallest possible negative impact on our environment. Sustainability includes energy efficiency, avoiding harmful chemicals and toxins, recycling and upcycling whenever possible, and sourcing items from as close to your location as you can.
Sustainability also plays a significant role in holistic interior design, as it means making responsible choices that have positive physical and psychological effects.
To show you how a healthy, sustainable home can be achieved through holistic interior design, we’d like to share the results of a remodeling project we completed recently on behalf of a client. In this case, sustainability and the use of healthy materials were top of mind due to the owner’s own sensitivity to mold and toxic chemicals.
Here’s an overview of some of the ways we were able to incorporate healthy materials into the home design:
Kitchen: To avoid toxins commonly found in mass-manufactured cabinetry, we purchased cabinetry locally through Greenhome Solutions, which uses FSC-certified wood and no glues or formaldehyde. This is a much healthier option for the client, who suffers from severe allergies.
Flooring: The flooring was also purchased locally through Greenhome Solutions, so it was also FSC-certified and free of glues and formaldehyde.
Walls: Low-VOC paints were used in all rooms throughout the house.
Master bedroom and bathroom: During the demolition phase, large amounts of mold and leaking water were discovered, which likely had contributed to the owner’s allergies. We had everything under the floors and walls demolished and replaced, and mold remediation was done in the bathroom.
Working with local companies is more sustainable, but there’s an important advantage as well. If any issues had arisen during the remodeling project, buying locally would have significantly reduced the turnaround time to get things back on track. Time delays add change orders and money to a project, which is something nobody wants.
How We Can Help You Achieve a More Holistic Home
As promised, here are the before and after pictures of the kitchen portion of the recent remodel we did incorporating sustainable resources.
And if you think sustainable interior design can’t be beautiful: Think again.
Kitchen remodel: before pictures
KITCHEN REMODEL: AFTER PICTURES
At Well-Designed Home, we explore creative ways to achieve your desired look and feel through locally sourced, sustainably made products and resources. We are inspired by the natural elements in the world around us and approach interior design in a sustainable way that is healthier for your mind and body and better for our environment.
We see your home’s hidden potential and know what is possible for any space, while our holistic design process puts your personal wellness needs upfront. If you’d like to learn more, book a complimentary discovery call with us today.