Biophilic Design Book: At Home with Nature

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Marianna Popejoy, author of the biophilic design book ‘At Home with Nature‘ (affiliate link) which is all about using biophilic design principles to create a happy, healthy home. I knew that I would love this book as soon as Marianna’s PR team reached out to me. In fact, I almost wrote this book myself but didn’t. I am so pleased that Marianna took on the challenge though and broke down the biophilic design principles that we can use in our homes in such an accessible and understandable way.

The book is absolutely beautiful from start to finish. The linen cover provides a tactile experience from the moment you pick it up and the embossed writing on the cover is such beautiful detail. The belly band gives you a glimpse of what to expect inside and build the anticipation around the book. This is definitely a book that I will be proud to have out on display in my home.

As I read the introduction I learnt that Marianna is a self-confessed “Accidental Biphiliac”, something that I strongly relate to. She admits that she isn’t an architect or scientist but that she discovered the term biophilic design after having developed a strong connection to integrating nature into her own home and subsequently forging a career helping people to design their homes in line with the biophilic design principles.

The Benefits of Biophilic Design

The book starts by exploring the many benefits of biophilic design that help you transform your home into a restorative sanctuary where you can retreat from the hustle and bustle of modern-day living. These benefits include:

• Increased Cognitive Performance
• Improved Energy
• Reduced Anxiety
• Better Quality of Sleep
• Reduced Stress
• Improved Mood
• Faster Recovery
• Strengthened Immune System

The Principles of Biophilic Design

In the book, Marianna has broken biophilic design down into six core principles and she explains these principles throughout the 12 chapters of the book.

These chapters explore:

1. Colour Psychology
2. Sunlight & our Circadian Rhythm
3. Views & Vistas
4. Air Quality
5. Plants
6. Natural Materials
7. Shapes & Forms
8. Patterns & Processes
9. Light & Space
10. A Sense of Place
11. Seasonal Changes
12. Awaken the Senses

If you’ve ever read up about biophilic design from experts you will have noticed that can be a very dry and academic topic that uses complicated language making it not the easiest subject to grasp. It is quite a scientific concept but what I love about this book is the way that Marianna has simplified it so that anyone can pick it up, learn something new and get inspiration for taking immediate action to incorporate it into their own home.

She shares simple and inexpensive examples of small DIY changes you can make to your home that work for renters as well as homeowners. This really is an entry-level biophilic design book that removes the overwhelm and explains it without all the complicated jargon.

Interview with Biophilic Design Book Author Marianna Popejoy

So below, I interview Marianna about her biophilic design book At Home with Nature (affiliate link).

Can you give us a brief introduction to yourself, what you do, and your background?

Yes, so my name’s Marianna Popejoy. Before I had my son Finn, I worked for our creative agency with my husband and did copywriting. Once my son was born, I realised that agency life was not very good for having children. The hours didn’t really go hand-in-hand with motherhood or parenthood so I retrained as a Pilates instructor.

It was a bit of a curveball which I absolutely loved. As I was teaching Pilates from home, I wanted to design my home to have that restorative feel. This actually helped me to make a lot of the choices in the design of those spaces. This then led to a lot of people asking me to design their homes and outdoor spaces.

I’ve always been obsessed with interior design. From as young as probably six years old I’ve always wanted to create spaces. But when people started asking me to design theirs, I’d always said no. I didn’t want to do it for a career. When you do things as a career, it really can change the way you feel about your passion. But eventually, I decided to give it a go and it took over the Pilates. So I stopped teaching Pilates to go all in with interior design.

In the book, you describe yourself as “an accidental biophiliac”. Can you explain this?

Absolutely. I have to hold my hands up as I wasn’t aware of the term biophilic design until about 2017, when a lot of bloggers and magazines started approaching us and saying, “Wow! Your space is so biophilic, we want to use your home as an example of biophilic design”. So I had to Google what that meant. And then the more I learned about it, the more I realised that we had intentionally designed our home to feel connected to nature. I just wasn’t aware that there was a term to explain what that meant before.

For anyone who doesn’t know what Biophilic Design is, could you please explain?

The words Biophilic Design don’t mean much to people today. But it’s quite simple. The word Biophilia means a love of life. The biologist Edward O. Wilson came up with the concept that humans have this innate desire to feel connected to nature from a biological sense. Then Stephen Kellert came along, and he coined the phrase Biophilic Design and brought that concept into interior design and architecture in the eighties. So it is still a relatively recent theory.

We’re starting to hear people talking about it now but they’re scared of using a word like Biophilic because it sounds so scientific that it puts people off. But it’s really just about bringing those natural experiences inside the home, like the light and colour and touch that you associate with nature and that sense of calm you get from being in nature when you feel your blood pressure drop and your shoulders relax. You want to create that restorative environment so you don’t walk in and feel instantly stressed.

It doesn’t need to be too technical or overwhelming, it’s just about how you feel in nature and then incorporating that into the decor in your home.

Is that why you decided to write the book? To share all that information with people in an accessible way?

A lot of people undertook home improvement projects in lockdown. Once we’d been in Lockdown for about 6 months, I realised that we were in a privileged position of safety, good health, and being in a loving family. But then I had to ask myself, why did me and my family feel so comfortable in this situation? We didn’t feel trapped by our home at all, even though, we had a relatively modest 2 bedroom terraced home in London without a big outdoor space.

We almost felt held and like it was a protective space, and I honestly think that the reason for that was just some of the decisions that we made in the design of the home. It was such a lovely space to be in. So I wanted to write a book that gives people relatable practical tips that aren’t super expensive. There are some really inspiring homes in the book, but most of them are real homes, and most of them have used principles from biophilic design that anyone could use to make their spaces feel exactly the way that we felt during Lockdown.

As I had plenty of time on my hands I decided to write the book. I thought that even if it never turns into a book I could always publish it as a series of blog posts.

Do you think the lockdown fast-tracked the adoption of biophilic design?

The lockdown has most definitely changed the kind of interior design that I’m seeing. It’s not just changed the look and the aesthetics of the way that we live. But I think that we definitely think more about the practicalities of the way that we live as well. For example, things like open space living where people aren’t so keen on that anymore. We started to realize that we need to have those little protective spaces where you can feel a little bit more cocooned and have that bit of distance away from your family when you want to.

Biophilic Design is becoming a bit of a trend now, or is it?

For years I’ve been obsessed with interior design. I’ve made a lot of questionable design choices in my past like I would expect a lot of interior designers have, because that’s how you learn, and that’s how you find your niche with your style. I think that’s something that goes hand in hand with youth. You want to follow the trends. You see something you like and then you bring it in before you ask yourself if you can actually live with it.

We need to stop looking at what other people are doing. Figure out what it is that you love and start designing or decorating from your intuition. Start designing spaces that make you feel happy and calm or inspired when you’re in them. When I start decorating from my intuition, I realized that all of my inspiration was coming from nature. Those were the things that made me feel happy and calm at home and invigorated and inspired.

In the biophilic design book, you talk about creating a natural flow to keep your home cohesive and consistent. How can we do that?

It would be really uninspiring if every room was the same. So we definitely don’t want to go down that road. My best advice is to imagine yourself lying on a couch with a therapist, and they’re asking you to transport yourself back to the place where you feel the most calm.

If your favorite colour is green, I’m guessing that you probably really love being out in the forest or in lush green spaces. That’s my choice whereas my husband’s choice is to be next to the sea. He always wants to go on holiday by the sea. We’ve moved to the sea now, that’s how much we love it. So ask yourself that question and think about what is it about those spaces that make you feel happy. Is it the colour palette? Is it the natural materials?

Usually, it’s a bit of everything. You want to incorporate all of those things into your spaces, and use that as your starting point.

So let’s take green, for example, and say you’ve painted your living space green. Then how do you bring that into the rest of the home? Obviously, plants are green, so it could just be as simple as deciding that the next room will be a taupe because that’s a little bit warmer and a little bit more cocooning. But you could bring in that green through the plants. So already you’ve got that consistency.

Another example is that you might have a little reclaimed wooden table in your living room and you could create that flow by having the same kind of wooden elements in bowls that are up on the shelves in the kitchen for example, or a seagrass chair in the bedroom.

So it’s very subtle and just requires us to think about it as being a similar language in each room, just so that it doesn’t jar. All the spaces in your home should flow nicely into one another without being identical. You want your brain to get the message that we’re moving through the home, we’re having different experiences in each room but there is not a jolt to the system.

I imagine this flow makes decorating your home a lot easier?

When you design your home like this, it gives it enough coherence that you can move things seamlessly throughout your home as they should work in any room.

Our house, for example, was a little bit like a jigsaw. I had these French mattresses dotted around the home. One was used for the headboard in our bedroom. Another was used for this little chair that we had under the stairs on top of some storage, and then the other one lived underneath my son’s mattress.

That gave us 3 mattresses that we could just take out into the garden, use them as loungers, stack them all up, create a nice little sofa, and use them on our accent chairs as well. They just looked like they were meant to be there because all of the colours in our outdoor space were very much reflected in our indoor space.

Having this flow works particularly well for smaller homes too. You just have to think about the items that you bring into your home and whether they can be multi-functional. If the answer is yes, then you should probably buy it. If the answer is no, then it’s taking up valuable space in your home that maybe another item could better serve you in your lifestyle.

So what are your favourite principles of Biophilic Design?

That’s so tricky. In Biophilic Design, we talk about creating an ecosystem in the home and to create that ecosystem you want to incorporate as many biophilic principles as you can. Because then you really are going to feel nature. So it’s hard to come up with some favorites. But I would say that fundamentally, sunlight and your Circadian rhythm are so important.

So, think about where you place your furniture to get the most out of that natural sunlight, especially at this time of year with such short days. Sunlight can be life changing, but it’s not always possible to make structural changes to maximise the natural light.

So then you’re looking at intuitive lighting. And there are some amazing systems out there that mimic the hues and the behaviour of natural light. So you get your cooler lights mimicking natural daylight, and then you get your softer, warmer lights at dusk. This triggers those same impulses in the brain so that you know that this soft dusk lightning signals time to shut down and sleep.

You might want to consider getting a little oscillating fan as well to create a natural breeze, get some movement going and create some ventilation.

What about colour? How do we choose the right colour for our home?

Think again about the therapist’s question. That place you choose is a great place to find inspiration for your colour palette. You need to find the colour that speaks to you. Everybody’s different in the way that they perceive colour, and that’s why it can be quite tricky, particularly if you have a partner who doesn’t share the same aesthetic as you. What you’re really looking for is a feeling and that is what makes it difficult.

What would you say is the most underutilized principle of Biophilic Design?

It’s not very sexy but I’d say patterns and processes and in particular storage. If you haven’t thought about your storage, you are going to question your life choices every day. If things aren’t organized and put away, it really affects the way that I feel at home. So for that reason, I would put patterns and processes up there.

But it’s not just about organization and storage, although that is a huge part of it. It’s also thinking about the function of the space. Asking how do I need it to function? This is so important because if the home doesn’t work for you, it doesn’t matter how good it looks.

If you would like to read Marianna’s biophilic design book At Home With Nature you buy it here:

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