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Designing Healthier Homes
Instagram: Recipes For Design
There is a growing awareness of the importance of health in our built environment. How our homes are designed and constructed can significantly impact our health and well-being.
Several features and design methods can be incorporated into the design of a healthier home. These include:
- Adequate ventilation and air quality - The most effective way to mitigate the propagation of indoor pollutants is by choosing modern, non-toxic, sustainable building materials that are purposely created for safe construction and use in the home –hence promoting physical, mental and environmental health.
Natural light -. We spend about 90% of our time in interior environments, not getting the proper balance of bright days and nights. Living beings are biologically linked to light - the primary stimulus for maintaining the circadian rhythm.
Salutogenic Design - The design model offers a network of tactics to enhance the inhabitants' sense of understanding of the space, manageability, and sense of meaningfulness in the space. These factors have been proven to improve the mental and physical well-being of a building. While salutogenic design can be applied to any structure, it proves most advantageous to healthcare facilities where the built environment influences patient recovery and fosters a natural healing process.
Sustainability Adequate ventilation and air quality - architecture aims to create healthier buildings for their surrounding environment and inhabitants. The biophilic design embraces the celebration of nature as a mission. From natural colours, textures and shapes to the feelings that nature evokes to the understanding that the mind and the body develop within a “sensorially rich world”. It uses the idea of nature to alleviate stress, improve air quality, and support cognitive function. Fundamentally, the principle emphasizes the connection between indoor environments and occupants with nature. With all the ongoing design trends consolidated, the demand has focused on organic materials that emulate outdoor environments.
We spend around 90% of our time indoors. In 2022, lockdown lethargy still continues to drive most people’s lifestyles. The pandemic was a turning point in the architecture industry’s understanding of health and wellbeing. Ideas and experimentation in the following two years have allowed architects to better implement the science of well-being through design strategies. Becoming increasingly aware of the impact built environments have on us, there is a growing interest in understanding the universal effects of building design on bodily health.
So when designing your home, perhaps you can consider some of the above ideas.
