Your Next Design Move is Outside: How Nature Can Shape Your Interior Design Style

Why Nature is Your Best Interior Design Partner and how Nature Can Shape Your Interior Design Style

Ever feel like your Pinterest board is full, but your mind isn’t clearer? You’re not alone. Decision fatigue is real, especially when every trend seems to contradict the last. But what if your next interior direction isn’t online at all?

What if it’s right outside your window?

Nature Can Shape Your Interior Design Style. Biophilic design isn’t about driftwood lamps or sticking seashells to your bathroom tiles. It’s about connection. To place, to light, to material. It’s about designing spaces that feel like a continuation of your environment, not a cut and paste Pinterest fantasy.

Stunning colour palette pulled from this sunset view

Designing with Nature Isn’t Literal. It’s Emotional.

Take a recent Olive & Wilde client: their living room faced an expansive, ever changing sea view. Instead of competing with it, we leaned in. A sea blue velvet sofa echoed the horizon, deep one moment, pale the next. The walls and ceiling? Painted the same soft tone to blur the line between inside and out. With every shift in daylight, the room evolved. It didn’t just reflect the sea, it responded to it.

Then there’s The Bouji Bolthole, a coastal property, but not a cliché. No anchors, no navy stripes. Just the soft golden tones of a September sunset. Rippled light from glass blocks mimics sunlight on waves. Bare plaster and sandy looking tiles in the shower bring a hint of a beach walk underfoot, without a single seagull ornament in sight.

This is biophilic design with feeling. Not theming.

Bathroom moodboard for The Spanish House, bringing sandy texture and wooden detailing from the view outside the bathroom window

What Biophilic Design Gets Right

• It grounds you. Whether you’re by the sea, in the hills, or city based but nature hungry, design that nods to your environment helps you feel rooted.

• It adds emotional ROI. Guests remember how a place felt. You don’t need to shout “beach house!” when you can whisper “sun warmed stone.”

• It simplifies decisions. When you design from a natural reference point, everything connects, colour, texture, mood. That’s the essence of the Red Thread.

  
  

Misconceptions: It’s Not About Being Literal

Here’s what people often get wrong: they assume “nature-inspired” means replicating the obvious. Like sand coloured walls and literal sand on the floor. But true biophilic design is interpretive.

One client wanted “sunset in Barbados”, without anything bright. So we worked from their real sunset images, pulled soft peaches, watery pinks, and hints of aqua. Colour drenched the walls in a barely there peach. The result? Sunset vibes, but elegant, elevated, and emotionally spot on. Not a plastic flamingo in sight.

How to Start Your Own Red Thread

• Go for a walk. No headphones.

• Notice the colours, materials, textures around you.

• What are you repeatedly drawn to?

• What season, landscape, or time of day feels most “you”?

• Start a Pinterest board, but scroll with awareness. What themes come back again and again?

  
  

This is where the Red Thread comes in.

A preview of what you will find in your guide on how to find your red thread

A Tool to Help You Start: The Red Thread PDF

If you want to build interiors that feel connected, cohesive and personal — not chaotic — the Red Thread PDF is a smart place to begin. It’s a cost effective guide to help you:

• Identify your personal design cues

• Spot the patterns in your preferences

• Create a moodboard that becomes your decision making anchor

  
  

You don’t need a whole plan. Just a starting point. And this is a strong one.

→ Download The Red Thread PDF here