Biophilic Design Is Not Just Plants and Green Walls

Why the world's fastest-growing design philosophy is being misread - and what lies beyond it.

Let me be honest with you about something I have been watching happen, with increasing unease, across every interior platform and design publication over the last couple of years.

Biophilic design is everywhere in the media. And in becoming everywhere, it is in danger of becoming nothing, as many media outlets dilute this design philosophy into an over simplified checklist of plants and green paint.

Search the term online right now. What you will find, with remarkable consistency, is this: green paint or a living wall. A room full of trailing plants and vast expanses of glazing.

It is attractive. It is calming. It photographs beautifully. And it is only the most surface-level reading of what biophilic design actually is.

I have been a biophilic designer for over six years now, working with homeowners, retreat guests, and holiday property owners to create spaces rooted in the natural world. In April of this year, my words on this subject were including in author Marianna Popejoys wonderful article for Living Etc, alongside a conversation that is increasingly happening at the edges of the industry: biophilic design is not just about plants. It is about people. And if we let it be simplified into just another aesthetic - a look you can achieve by ordering a few trailing pothos and booking a painter to do the kitchen in a muted green — we will have missed the most powerful invitation it offers.

This post is an attempt to put some of that depth back

The misreading: how biophilic design became a trend

Biophilic design has its roots in the work of psychologist Erich Fromm and biologist E.O. Wilson, defining the term biophilia as our innate human need to connect with living systems. It was later developed into a rigorous design framework by researchers including Stephen Kellert with 70+ ways to design with nature. Kellert’s work was later honed into 15 core “Patterns” of Biophilic Design by Terrapin Bright Green, and these remain the most comprehensive map we have of how nature functions in human environments. Research and studies over the last 40 years have supported these theories giving us a science backed framework for truly restorative design.

These 15 patterns include things like non-rhythmic sensory stimuli (the unpredictable flicker of firelight, the movement of leaves in wind), prospect and refuge (the instinctive pull toward spaces that offer both a wide view and a sense of shelter), complexity and order (the fractal geometries that appear in fern fronds and river deltas and that our brains process without effort). They include thermal and airflow variability, the sounds of water, the presence of living materials and a feeling of awe.

Plants are in there. But they are one small element of how biophilic design can positively shape the spaces we inhabit. And they are not even the most significant one.

What happened, as biophilic design moved from architectural theory into the mainstream interiors’ conversation, is what happens to most complex ideas when they travel through social media and trend forecasting: they were compressed into their most visually communicable form. Plants are photogenic. Living walls are dramatic. Sage green paint has a reassuring, nature-adjacent quality that reads instantly in a scroll.

And so, a philosophy rooted in neuroscience, evolutionary biology and the full sensory experience of the natural world became, in the public imagination, an aesthetic. A mood. A cookie-cutter look you can just buy and call it biophilic.

I should note at this point that one look at my own home (above) and you will see I am obsessed with green and plants – because they root me to the places in nature I feel most restored. I have felt the immensely powerful benefits of living in a space designed to reflect these natural spaces – why? Because my home is designed to support me and my husband by reflecting our relationship with nature and not because we are following a trend or one design look. Our green home and my plant collection are very intentional as a design decision to feel connected to our special places in nature. Our home is rented, which means we are working with what we have.

The second misreading: biophilic design has one face.

There is a second problem, and it concerns me just as much as the plant & green fixation.

Open any interiors platform, search any hashtag, browse any design publication covering biophilic spaces in 2026 - and you will find, with remarkable sameness, one aesthetic looking back at you. The overall effect: serene, considered, beautifully photographed.

This has become the visual shorthand for biophilic design, and it is potentially doing the concept enormous damage because it is locking an infinitely adaptable philosophy inside a single aesthetic box. And when everything looks the same, people stop seeing. The image becomes wallpaper. The idea becomes a trend.

Biophilic design can be maximalist or minimalist, saturated or spare, layered or restrained. Style is not the point. Connection is.

A client design inspired by a woodland experience, where texture was the key inspiration - not green or plants

Here is what I want to say clearly: biophilic design does not belong to any one aesthetic. It is not a design label. It is not Japandi. It is not Scandi calm. It does not have to be muted, plant-filled, wood-panelled look that currently dominates every search result. Those spaces can absolutely be biophilic, but so can a richly coloured, pattern-layered, collected-over-decades room.

A maximalist home full of botanical prints, geological specimens, vintage natural textiles, and the accumulated evidence of a life fully lived in and near nature can be profoundly biophilic. A deeply saturated room in the exact indigo of a twilight sky over water, filled with the textures of the places its owner loves most, is biophilic design at its most personal and most powerful. A child's bedroom bursting with colour and natural pattern with animal forms, fractal geometries, the shapes, and markings of the living world is biophilic design too.

The natural world itself is not one aesthetic. Think of what you find within a single square mile of Lakeland landscape for example: the stark geometry of dry-stone walls, the exuberant tangle of a hedgerow in July, the drama of a tarn reflecting a winter sky, the rich complexity of a woodland floor in autumn. Nature contains multitudes. And biophilic design, when it is functioning as it should, reflects the specific multitude that belongs to you.

The danger (and this is real) is that as biophilic design grows in profile and search volume, the homogenised version crowds out everything else. People who love colour, pattern, maximalism, drama, and expressing their personality through design will see the search results and conclude this isn't for me. And they miss entirely the thing that is most for them: a design approach that begins not with a look but with their relationship with nature and builds outward from there.

What biophilic design actually asks of us

Here is what tends to get lost in the plant-and-green-wall version of biophilic design: it is, at its most profound, a practice of self-knowledge.

Presence before Pinterest

To design biophilically - truly, rather than decoratively - you have to know something real about your own relationship with nature. This is why I advocate "presence before pinterest". You have to have paid attention to the places and conditions in the natural world that affect how you feel. Not nature as separate entity from us, or in the abstract. Not 'nature' as a generic category of good things. Your nature. The specific landscapes and environments, colours pattern, materials, light, sound, and air that make your nervous system settle.

For some people, this is the ocean. The light on open water, the smell of salt air, the sound of waves. For others, it is woodland (this is me, hence my love of green and plants) the shade, the shadows, the layering of forms, the sense of being held within something larger and older than themselves. Equally it can be the high exposed places: moorland, mountain, the sensation of wind and vast open sky.

These are not aesthetic preferences. They are physiological responses rooted in personal history and lived experience - the places where something in you first learned to rest. And they are the most powerful source of inspiration available to you when you design your home.

When I work with a client, or when I spend a day with the guests on my Design with Nature retreat, the first thing we do is not look at paint swatches or browse tile suppliers. We go into nature. We slow down, we sit and observe, allowing ourselves to be still, quiet and open. We embrace the connection., with no agenda. Only then, after this experience concludes do we ask:

what does that place look like?

What does it feel like, smell like, sound like? What time of day/year is it?

What light quality?

What is the quality of the air?

We allow ourselves to follow what we feel drawn to – this is where our relationship with nature, within this lived experience, opens us to inspiration.

This is a different process from choosing a wallpaper because it features botanicals. It is a different process from painting a room green because green is a nature colour. It is an act of connection then translation - from a lived, felt, deeply personal experience of the natural world into the materials, forms, colours, and qualities of light that make a room feel like yours. The design selections you make with this process can anchor you to spaces in nature that help you feel restored, powerful choices indeed when you consider we spend 90% of our time indoors.

The difference between referencing nature and being rooted in it.

There is a distinction I return to again and again, in my writing and in my design practice, and it is this:

There is design that references nature, and there is design that is rooted in it.

Referencing nature gives you a room that looks nature adjacent. Botanical prints. Indoor plants. A palette pulled from a general sense of what 'natural' means. The result is often pleasant. It is often calming in a generic way. But it doesn't move you. It doesn't carry you anywhere specific because it wasn't drawn from anywhere specific.

One retreat guest translated her woodland experience guided by the sounds of the river

Design rooted in your nature experiences gives you something entirely different. It gives you a room that returns you, again and again, to the particular places and conditions in the natural world that restore you. It is design that will stay with you for a long time – not one you can’t wait to change next year because it is not “on trend.” The pattern on the cushion that carries you back to the woodland you walk through when you need to think. The colour on the wall that is the exact tone of the fell at dusk you couldn’t stop looking at.

These are not simply decorative choices. They are a form of daily restoration, embedded into the architecture of your ordinary life. Colours, pattern, materials, and texture chosen with intention. And they work because the brain recognises them - not as pleasant abstractions, but as signals of the specific environments in which it has previously been safe, calm and at ease.

Why this matters more in 2026 than ever before.

The conversation about biophilic design is growing and growing fast. The industry reports tell us that wellness design is becoming a baseline expectation across residential, hospitality and workplace sectors. People are increasingly seeking spaces that do something for them, not just spaces that look good.

This is an extraordinary opportunity. And it is also a moment of real risk, because the version of biophilic design that is currently reaching the largest audience is the simplified one. The plants and the green paint and the living wall. The aesthetic that can be sourced from a trend list and applied to any room regardless of the person who lives in it or their relationship to nature.

If that is what biophilic design becomes in the public imagination — a look, a style, a checklist — then it will do what every interior trend does eventually: it will peak, feel dated, and be replaced by the next thing. The wood panelling will come down. The living wall will die. And the profound, evidence-based, genuinely life-improving practice of designing spaces in deep relationship with the natural world will have been missed entirely.

I do not want that to happen. I don't think you do either, which is perhaps why you've read this far.

An invitation: to look more closely at your own relationship with nature.

Design with Nature is the name I have given to my approach – where biophilic design is the framework and nature connection is the source of inspiration for design. The retreat days I run in Cumbria are for people who want to explore this at depth. The name is intentional. It is not design inspired by nature, or design that looks like nature. It is design with nature: in dialogue with it, responsive to it, rooted in a specific and personal experience of it.

The retreat day is structured around exactly the process I've described above. We spend time in a woodland of the Lake District. Not because a woodland is the only design source for designing with nature, but because the practise of Shinrin-Yoku (Forest Bathing) opens the senses and ignites creativity. We pay attention, with slowness, to what the natural world around us is actually doing: the quality of the light, the textures of bark, stone, and sounds of water, the patterns and forms that appear when you look closely enough. We let the senses do their work. Nature is guiding us.

And then we bring those observations back to the question of home. What did you notice? What moved you? What specific quality of this landscape carries something you want to feel in your daily life? And how we might translate that into the space where you live?

The result is not a room that looks like a biophilic design mood board, or even a woodland. It is a room that feels like you - one anchored in the places that restore you, expressed through design choices that are deeply personal.

That is what I believe biophilic design is capable of, creating a home that carries you back, dozens of times every day, to the places in the natural world where you know how to rest.

If this resonates, the Design with Nature retreat day runs in the Lake District - see new dates here. astoryofhome.com/retreats

Sharon Lomas is a biophilic interior designer and the founder of A Story of Home, based in Cumbria. Her words have been featured in Living Etc. She collaborates with homeowners, holiday property owners, and retreat guests to design spaces rooted in the places that restore us. astoryofhome.com