The Best in Home Design, From Donald Judd’s Silver Tableware to The Met’s Artful Furniture
The Big Idea: Green Space
In the renderings for Casa Atibaia, a concept by architects Charlotte Taylor and Nicholas Préaud, the minimalist home hovers above a river in a tropical forest, supported by monolithic rock formations. These natural pillars define the interiors, forming the walls of a dressing room and bathroom.
The structure wraps around existing vegetation to create a natural courtyard, and its floor-to-ceiling glass windows allow the indoor spaces to visually blend with the lush, leafy surroundings.
Though ground hasn’t yet been broken, Atibaia—named for a municipality in São Paulo, Brazil— provides a convincing argument for the benefits of biophilic design. And since the advent of Covid-19, the term has gained a renewed importance among design cognoscenti and their clients.
“The resulting feeling of this jungle home is one of complete symbiosis with the natural environment,” says Préaud, noting that he and Taylor started working on the plans in March 2020. “And this is something many people either acted on, or longed for, during the pandemic.”
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The principles crowded under the umbrella of biophilic design are many, but they’re all ultimately geared toward promoting a sense of well-being. “Its intent is creating experiences of nature in the built environment and doing it in a way that reduces stress, improves cognitive performance, and elevates mood,” says Bill Browning, cofounder of the Washington, D.C.–and New York City–based green-building research-and-consulting firm Terrapin Bright Green, which specializes in biophilic design. “This can range from putting plants in a space and using natural building materials, to fractals and biomorphic forms, to green building and unimpeded views of nature through a space. All of it is biophilic design.”
Some practitioners—such as the monomymous Irish interiors maven, Clodagh—have built entire careers on those core tenets. Her recent designs for spas at the Six Senses hotels in Portugal’s Douro Valley and Milas, Turkey, feature plentiful windows for views of the surroundings and living walls planted with lush green foliage.
Unlike other design philosophies, this is one interiors movement backed by real research, with applications from private homes to hospitals. “We have evidence that people healed quicker and felt better” in medical and rehabilitation facilities with connections to nature, Browning says, citing a 2013 article published by the American Public Health Association. And when the Royal Institute of British Architects commissioned Terrapin to write a book on biophilic design in 2020 (Nature Inside: A Biophilic Design Guide, now in its third printing), Browning’s team found that businesses that had “explicitly used biophilic design standards for their spaces have better recruitment and worker retention.”
Which is why its proponents say biophilic design—a few examples of which you’ll see on the following pages—is worth its premium. “A plastic table can be just as sturdy as one made of wood, but the feel of the wood instantly reconnects us with nature,” Browning says. “We intuitively know that being in nature makes us happier.”
