If you are in London this weekend, and want some home inspiration, visit WESTFIELD at Shepherds Bush where you will be able to experience Oliver Heath’s new Home Pop-Up - “Healthy Home”.
Oliver Heath, sustainable and wellbeing designer, to curate a biophilic-designed home pop-up space to inspire visitors to design their homes with sustainability and wellness in mind
Westfield London is hosting a biophilic-designed home pop-up called ‘Healthy Home’, with renowned sustainable and wellbeing designer Oliver Heath, working with a range of home and interior brands to curate an exclusive collection inspired by biophilia. Visitors to the pop-up, which will be live between 19th to 22nd May, will be able to discover the benefits of biophilic design and how to transform their own homes into mindful and restorative spaces through clever designs that focus on various approaches, ranging from sensory design to supporting biodiversity.
The pop-up leads the wider ‘Design for Living’ home event at Westfield London, where the centre’s home and interior retailers will be spotlighting new season products and on-trend solutions, as well as hosting a series of in-store activations to inspire ideas for the home.
You can explore the different room sets – including a garden, dining room, living room, bedroom, work, and exercise space - for inspiration on how to boost their wellbeing at home through different design techniques and products. In addition, Oliver will be present at the ‘Healthy Home’ pop-up on Saturday 21st May, to meet visitors and will host a 30min workshop session* on how to design a healthy home, using insights and tips from his latest book, ‘Design A Healthy Home: 100 Ways to Transform Your Space for Physical and Mental Wellbeing’.
Biophilic design reflects the move to create spaces with occupant wellbeing as the utmost priority by enhancing connections to nature and natural systems. The pop-up will bring to life this concept of a ‘healthy home’ through a series of immersive, informative, and interactive home and interior installations and activations. Home and interior brands that will be showcased in the space include Habitat, Heals, Raft, Natuzzi, John Lewis and Partners, Yes Colours and Bo Concept.
We caught up with Oliver to ask him a bit more about the event:
What do you hope will be the main outcome of this?
That visitors to the Westfield London ‘Healthy Home’ home pop-up will start to rethink the way that they use design to improve their homes, not just to make it look better, but to go deeper and to use the many design tips and tricks discussed in the pop-up to support their physical and mental wellbeing. That could be to improve air and water quality, to sleep better, engage with nature or simply to think about the benefits of natural colours, materials and textures. The opportunities are quite literally life changing!
Why is it important that we take a physical manifestation of Biophilic Design into the shopping centres?
There are multiple benefits to enhancing nature connections in retail spaces. Firstly, engaging with nature is a powerful design tool in the built environment, as everyone has had a positive experience of it – Biophilic Design reconnects us with those experiences. So we can create spaces that improve visitor experiences – to stimulate and excite but also to calm and recuperate.
Shopping centres can be busy overwhelming spaces for many people, and whilst this can be exciting it’s also good to find a moment to relax and restore one’s physical and mental energy. So even just a few minutes gazing immersing oneself in nature rich experiences can transform and refresh the way customers feel.
Secondly for retail centres owners, research studies have shown that when natural features such as sunlight, plants, trees and water are present it can increase customer dwell times, increase rates of return, and rather incredibly, also enhance shoppers’ perceptions of the value of goods!
And lastly – nature is under a deep threat right now , so we need to find ways of welcoming it back into our cities and spaces. When we engage and connect with it, we are more likely to recognise that our health and wellbeing is intrinsically linked to that of the nature around us, and this is an incredibly powerful way to encourage a wider desire to conserve and protect our planetary environment.
So it’s good for people, it’s good for business and its good for the planet – what more could you want?
How can people get involved and find out more about what you’re doing?
Come down and visit our multi-sensory immersive Healthy Homes Pop up at Westfield London which is free of charge and open between 10 and 5.30 until Sunday the 22nd May. There’s so much to see and learn! Tickets can also be found on Eventbrite.
Katie Wyle, General Manager at Westfield London said: “We’re thrilled to work with Oliver Heath, who is leading the way in innovative home design. At Westfield, we always look to offer our visitors and local communities the latest and future-gazing insights and trend-led experiences to help inform their lifestyle purchases. With the wide-ranging selection of home and interior brands available at our Home Quarter, we hope visitors to the pop-up will be inspired to ‘shop the look’ and can create their own healthy home.”
The ‘Healthy Home’ pop-up will be located by the Atrium on the Ground floor and will open at 10am on Thursday 19thMay and close at 6pm on Sunday 22nd May 2022. The space will be open to all Westfield London visitors and free of charge to enter.
If you want to find out more about Oliver Heath and his new book too, have a listen to a recent podcast we did with him on The Journal of Biophilic Design podcast.
To buy his book you could visit Bookshop.org or any good bookshop in your area or online.