More commercial clients are walking into project kickoffs asking for living walls, oversized windows and natural materials instead of the sterile drywall and laminate finishes that used to be standard. Biophilic design has steadily become one of the most requested features on commercial clients’ wish lists. Understanding why this shift is occurring, including client goals and the science behind it, can help design professionals execute biophilic design well.
Why Do Modern Commercial Clients Want Biophilic Design?
Biophilic elements used to be treated as an easy line item to cut when a budget got tight. Now, commercial clients increasingly see natural elements as part of what makes an office feel worth coming into, rather than a decorative element layered on at the end of a project.
These design components connect people to nature within buildings, and a workplace with daylight, greenery and natural materials can feel more intentional and hospitality-driven. A few themes tend to surface when clients request biophilic features:
- Spaces that support employee wellbeing, focus and a sense of calm.
- A design that reflects a broader commitment to sustainability.
- An interior that helps a building stand out in a competitive leasing market.
Companies also want to give employees a genuine reason to choose the office over working from home, and a space that feels calmer and more comfortable is part of that pitch. Biophilic elements are a fairly direct way to work toward all three of these goals at once.
What Does Science Say About Biophilic Design?
The connection between biophilic elements and cognitive performance isn’t theoretical. Promising brain imaging and monitoring data point to several consistent patterns:
- Prefrontal cortex activity was measured to be 50% lower in a room with a wall fully covered in vegetation than in a plain white room, suggesting reduced cognitive strain.
- Office workers used fewer neural resources to perform the same task in greened rooms compared to bare rooms.
- Parasympathetic nervous system activity, the body’s relaxation response, rose while participants performed a demanding working memory task near a living wall, rather than only afterward during recovery.
Biophilic design supports cognitive performance, stress regulation and employee wellbeing, which closely align with what commercial clients are already hoping for when they ask for a better office. Designers can use this evidence to frame biophilic features as performance-supporting design choices, rather than just aesthetic upgrades.
A biophilic interior design strategy works best when tied to the intended workplace outcome, whether that is enhancing a sense of calm, focus, recovery, tenant differentiation or collaboration. Results often depend on the type of feature, intensity, placement, maintenance quality and the task being performed.
What Are the Most Popular Biophilic Design Choices for Offices?
Here are the biophilic choices that keep resurfacing in commercial projects, along with why each one earns its place in the interior design plan.
Living Walls and Indoor Greenery
Living walls remain the most visually dramatic biophilic feature. They deliver an immediate connection to nature in spaces where a full garden or courtyard isn’t feasible. Beyond visual impact, living walls support positive brain activity. For clients working with limited square footage, even a modest wall panel can provide a measurable psychological lift for those seated nearby.
Design professionals should consider lighting needs, plant selection, replacement schedules and whether preserved moss or modular plant systems are a better fit for client spaces.
Daylighting and Skylights
Natural light is one of the more cost-effective biophilic strategies available, and it’s consistently a popular request once clients start thinking about what daylighting can do for a space. Maximizing daylight exposure through generous glazing, open floor plans and vertical light sources supports a sense of calm and alertness in ways artificial lighting alone doesn’t quite replicate.
Skylights are worth mentioning to clients working with deep floor plates or windowless interior zones where side lighting alone won’t suffice. Skylights flood a space with natural sunlight, which has been linked to improved mood and overall wellbeing. That biophilic design benefit translates directly from residential to commercial workspaces. In a central, high-traffic area, a skylight can anchor daylight throughout the floor plan.
Natural Materials and Textures
Wood grain, stone, natural fiber textiles and other organic materials count as indirect biophilic elements. They don’t require living plants but still trigger a sense of connection to the natural world through texture, pattern and color. These materials are popular with clients because they require less maintenance than living greenery while still contributing to a calmer aesthetic than an interior of glass and metal. The materials are also durable for busy office spaces.
Water Features and Ambient Sound
Flowing or ambient water, whether a dramatic lobby feature or a smaller tabletop element in a breakout space, adds a sensory dimension that plants and materials alone can’t provide. The sound of water has a well-documented calming effect. That makes it a strong choice for high-stress zones, such as executive floors or client-facing meeting areas, where a composed atmosphere matters most.
Water features must be designed around noise level, cleaning, humidity control and placement, so they do not distract employees or create maintenance concerns.
Views and Sightlines to Nature
Not every space can directly accommodate greenery or water features. Preserving or creating sightlines to outdoor nature, such as courtyards, green roofs or street trees, extends biophilic benefits without adding maintenance overhead. This is an increasingly common request for open-plan layouts, where furniture and partition placement can protect these views for as many desks as possible.
Interior designers and office managers should keep taller partitions away from windows, place shared spaces along exterior walls or use glass-fronted rooms to extend access to daylight and greenery deeper into the floor plan.
Layered and Combined Natural Elements
Biophilic elements tend to work best in combination rather than isolation. Layering two biophilic elements together produces meaningfully stronger effects on cognitive performance and physiological measures than either element does alone. For instance, an office space could have daylight plus wood finishes, greenery plus natural textures, or outdoor views plus quiet lounge seating.
In practice, pairing a living wall with abundant daylight, natural materials and a water feature will likely outperform any single intervention. Evaluate whether to invest in one standout feature or spread the budget across a few smaller complementary ones.
However, stacking too many sensory elements at once, such as visual greenery combined with piped-in nature sounds and strong natural scents, can overwhelm rather than calm occupants and may distract from focused work. The goal is a considered combination of two or three elements rather than including every available biophilic feature.
How Can Biophilic Design Drive Long-Term Value?
Biophilic design has earned a lasting place in commercial office planning because it works on two fronts at once. It’s something tenants tend to respond well to, and it’s supported by a growing body of research showing real effects on brain activity, stress and cognitive performance.
Biophilic design performs best when maintenance, operations and user experience are considered from the beginning. A living wall, a well-placed skylight or a considered material palette can be part of how well people think, feel and perform in a space day to day. As research continues to explore these effects, biophilic design is likely to become a baseline expectation in commercial spaces, driving value for those who can thoughtfully implement it.
