Natural hues, organic materials, and walled canvas adorned with painted landscapes can lend a hand in transforming your interior into a nature-inspired space. Focusing on elemental designs and specific colour palettes can bring about a serene calmness or a semi-wild aesthetic, depending on your taste.
In this guide, you’ll discover different ways to refresh your home to reflect nature’s endless beauty by bringing the great outdoors inside.
Natural Materials
Organic materials have been used for millennia to compose structures, furnishings, and decorations. Not only are they practical, but materials such as stone, wood and wicker are often sustainable and affordable.
By layering your space with natural materials, you can introduce earthy tones and warm accents to create a mid-century interior’s rustic but contemporary homeliness. Golden-brown woods such as teak are long-lasting and only get better with time.
Using metal furniture, whether brass, copper, bronze or iron, is often considered an industrial-style design choice, the complete opposite of a nature-inspired one. However, a patina is a remarkable way to decorate a room with a naturally aged, time-touched element. A green patina is a soft, muted sheen that slowly develops on certain materials over time due to oxidation and best represents the beauty of natural ageing.
Nature not only offers inspiration with warm colours and spectrums of green. Moodier, stormy hues can pair well with deeper woods like ebony and darker stones like slate for those who enjoy a melancholic, almost rainy aesthetic.
Inspired Shapes & Patterns
When we think of nature by design, shapes and forms, flow organically when left untouched. The curves, spirals, patterns, and geometry that occur in nature should offer ample inspiration when imitating the natural world.
Implementing floral motifs or botanical wall art can provide ways to incorporate natural design elements. These prints can be delicate and traditional, bold and contemporary, depending on the mood and feel of your space.
For an interior that mimics the geometrically balanced aspects of nature, intricate designs can be appropriated from fractals such as seashells, honeycombs and plant leaves. Symmetry can reflect order within a living space, similar to how it works within nature. Stony titles, geometric artwork and Fibonacci designs can bring balance to a room when layered alongside much wilder elements.
Natural Light
Lighting, ideally from a natural source, can enhance a room’s overall appearance and ‘feel’. When we enter a space filled with natural light, we often discover how much impact it has on general aesthetics.
Mirrors can be strategically hung opposite windows or doors to shepherd light around your space, creating extra, expansive dimensions. Installing floor-to-ceiling windows or sliding glass doors can allow more natural light to pour in whilst blurring the lines between indoor and outdoor spaces.
Instead of framing your windows with heavy, dark drapes that absorb outside light, you might choose lighter fabrics such as cotton or linen to filter light gently. If you’re opposed to curtains and drapes, wood-panelled shutters or blinds are a great way to introduce another natural element into your home.
Green Accents & Colourful Blooms
The most straightforward way to bring nature indoors is by introducing plants, flowers and other botanical elements like dried grasses. Pots of plants and pops of green add life, floral arrangements of bundled colours can brighten up a room with a fresh layer of vibrancy, and a shelf or window sill dotted with succulent plants helps to accent life around an interior.
Vertical gardens and hanging plants are perfect for interiors that may be lacking in space. Take advantage of walls and ceilings by potting plants in wall-mounted brackets or by having plants like ivy and red petunia drape from suspended pots.
Dried foliage arrangements such as hop garlands with pops of lavender serve a room veering on neutral, earthy hues, whilst a colour-rich bouquet of mixed florals or wildflowers can uplift most living spaces and work wonders for a pastel palette.
Sustainable, Natural, & Aged
With social consciousness supporting the idea of sustainable living, organic and eco-friendly designs have taken centre stage. Being mindful of our design choices and asserting our respect for nature ensures living spaces are kind to the source from which they draw inspiration.
Most materials of natural origin, if provided the proper care and treatment, are long-lasting and can be reclaimed or repurposed for several years.
Having undergone a natural ageing process, wood, metal, and stone can make a room feel more lived-in and inviting. Distressed furniture with soft flowing curves can add a sense of fluidity, and fixtures naturally aged by rich patina tend to elevate moody spaces.
To Wrap Things Up
Nature-inspired designs have served us since before time itself was first recorded. From using organic materials and free-flowing forms to painting our walls with floral motifs, nature has always been our greatest muse.
Harmonious, refreshing, and grounded, the natural world inspires us to shape our homes to promote forest-like tranquillity or comforting melancholy, creating a space that truly feels inspired by the outside world.
