The wellness trend, inspired by the alluring amenities within fine hotels and spa retreats, is stronger than ever. While it used to be satisfied with a soaking tub in the bath, a mountain bike hung on the wall, and a bonus room filled with exercise equipment, today’s homebuyers and homeowners are wanting full sensory experiences—sight, sound, scent, and touch.

Interior design trends for the next few years, according to the National Kitchen and Bath Association, will focus on sustainability and wellness, calming earth tones, and the importance of lighting design to enhance the mental and physical health of clients. This will be accomplished through personalization, clutter elimination, multifunctional appliances and biophilic design to bring the restorative benefits of nature and the outdoors into the home. These customizations can make a home uniquely appealing as well as more functional for years to come.

Air quality, water quality, and biophilic design

The Environmental Protection Agency reports that Americans spend 90% of their time indoors, making air quality a top concern as some pollutants can be as much as two to five times greater indoors than outdoors. Indoor pollutants have increased over the years due in part to energy-efficient building construction that sometimes lacks adequate mechanical ventilation to ensure proper air exchange, as well as the use of synthetic building materials and furnishings, fireplaces, household cleaners, paints, insecticides, radon, mold, pet dander, and deteriorating elements in older homes such as peeling paint, asbestos, and off-gassing from pressed wood products, sealants, and other chemicals.

Climate and the personal habits of a home’s occupants can also impact indoor air quality. The people who suffer the most from bad air are young children, seniors, and those with cardiovascular or respiratory disease and other illnesses. So, what can be done?

Working in conjunction with a home’s HVAC to regulate indoor temperatures, a fresh air ventilation system can be installed to push old air out of the home and brings in clean, fresh air from the outdoors. Whole house humidifiers and dehumidifiers can also be added. This is more advanced than an air purifier which only cleans and reuses the home’s indoor air.

Water filtration systems for the whole house rather than a single tap are designed to clean municipal tap water of disinfectants like chlorine and ammonia, along with other contaminants like “lead, copper, sulfate, nitrates, pesticides, herbicides, arsenic, industrial solvents and trihalomethanes” which can leak into the water and pose health risks to citizens. These systems can also be upgraded to include UV filters, salt-free water conditioners, and professional-grade bypass kits. The result is safer-to-drink, better-tasting, softer water that helps improve air quality as well as protects water pipes.

Biophilic design can be incorporated into any new home or existing interior design, and it’s well worth the effort. Without a connection to the relaxing, uplifting sights and sounds of nature, mental and physical health can atrophy. Biophilic design is a way to improve living space with a direct or indirect experience of the outdoors.

Direct experiences with nature include plants, light, water, and natural air movement. This can include the scent of flowers and plants in the home, views of greenery and trees, the sounds and sparkling water of a fountain or pool, bird song, and exposure to sunlight through an atrium, skylight or pergola. Indirect biophilic design celebrates natural materials like wood furniture and accents plus images of nature in photographs or in upholstery or wallpaper.

Cryotherapy, another word for cold therapy, should be familiar to you if you’ve ever held an icepack to a swollen knee injury or a bump on the head. It can be given through massages, sprays, ice baths, and needle probes for localized therapy, or it can be delivered to the whole body through an enclosed or semi-closed chamber that drops the temperature to negative 200–300°F. You only stay exposed for two to four minutes, but the benefits are numerous. By cooling and numbing nerves in the neck, cryotherapy can treat migraines. It can also treat pain and arthritis, which is why so many athletes and older people use cold therapy. The advantage to having your own cryotherapy chamber is you can step in and use it when you need it with little preparation.

Kitchens and Baths

Well Life, Live Well suggests that a healthy kitchen, as the heart of the home, is more than a space with visual appeal; it’s a place to make memories, anchor daily routines, and connect family and friends. It’s also a place of warmth and hospitality, and its appeal can “impact our desire to cook and eat healthily” as well as encourage us to devote more time to the pleasure of healthy meal preparation.

The most popular wellness kitchen appliances are both smart and multifunctional, with shut off monitors, leak detection, personalized settings and controls, and Wi-Fi access so homeowners can operate their appliances remotely. Smart refrigerators employ all this plus food inventory technology, to limit waste and manage escalating food prices, and some can even preserve food longer than normal expiration times. Some brands include flexible drawers that can be programmed to freeze, preserve wines, or refrigerate normally. They can even recommend menus and shopping needs.

Flexibility is also in demand with cooking appliances that can both reduce cooking times and deliver more precise results. Nearly half of home cooks want to use mobile apps and voice activation to control their ovens. Steam, in combination with convection and air fryer technology, cooks food more evenly with less chance of overcooking, produces food that tastes better, and easily revives leftover foods. Just as your car can notify you when you’ve left it unlocked, appliance apps can tell you if you left a burner on. These advancements have made appliances like microwaves, gas cooktops, and gas stoves far less popular. Steam is also popular in bathrooms, where steam showers have edged out rain-head showers as the must-have amenity.

Using materials to build or to remodel a home can become critical to wellness, with the emphasis on natural materials like wood and stone. However, composite wood typically use adhesives with formaldehyde, a Volatile Organic Compound that can irritate eyes, noses, throats, and damage the liver, kidneys and more. For kitchens and baths, it’s far better to use FSC-certified solid wood.

Sometimes, the most important wellness choices for your home aren’t features and appliances, but the home itself. You can have your home tested for environmental toxins, then make the decision which wellness features you’d like to have.