Sustainable Interior Design Trends for Modern Offices

Story at a glance:

• Open floor plans and flexible layouts are some of the most popular interior design trends in modern offices.
• Natural, recycled, and nontoxic materials are staple components, furthering a mission of sustainability.
• Illuminating office interiors with natural sunlight helps reduce carbon emissions and improve the occupant experience.

Office design is an ever-shifting thing that evolves in response to changing needs, expectations, and aesthetic preferences. Today’s interior design trends place a much stronger emphasis on sustainability, biophilia, and wellness than in years past.

This article explores seven sustainable interior design trends for modern offices.

1. Flexible Layouts & Furniture

From a sustainability standpoint flexible floor plans are ideal because they make it easier for an office building to adapt and evolve to changing needs without requiring major renovations. This in turn helps prevent undue construction waste that might otherwise be sent to a landfill.

Beyond reducing waste, a flexible floor plan helps offices accommodate a wider array of working styles and preferences, making for happier and more productive employees. “Modern office design needs to promote flexibility, as employees want to work in spaces that support their immediate work needs, allowing them to be both productive and innovative,” Scott Star, director of product development and global practice area leader at Gensler, previously told gb&d.

Flexibility was at the heart of Gensler’s Seattle office’s redesign. Designed first as a workshop, the office utilizes an open floor plan and makes extensive use of wheeled furniture, allowing for easy reconfiguration at a moment’s notice.

“The movable shelving can live and change over time in terms of what’s on the walls, what’s on the shelf, what’s important to staff, what’s relevant. It’s a much more flexible, non-precious aesthetic overall,” Ryan Haines, a managing director at Gensler Seattle, told gb&d in a previous interview. “Everything is on wheels in the whole space—including in the kitchen.”

In addition to the furniture, the physical design of Gensler’s new office is intentional in accommodating a wide array of employee needs—sit/stand desks provide areas for conventional independent work while rooms like Merge allow remote employees to call in and still feel connected to the rest of the office. Other spaces like the Nest provide employees with a quieter, darker place to work, and the room can be turned into a fully functional meeting space when necessary.

2. Natural Materials

With biophilic design an increasingly common addition to the modern office, interior designers are placing a greater emphasis on the use of exposed natural materials to help foster indirect connections to the outdoors. “The use of a natural material stimulates an innate and positive biophilic response in building occupants,” Scott Mooney, senior assistant at SRG Partnership, wrote in a previous gb&d article.

Natural materials like cork and bamboo have become increasingly popular flooring choices, whereas timber enjoys a myriad of interior design uses ranging from furniture and accents to ceilings and wall paneling. When used extensively in an office interior, these materials can make buildings appear more inviting and even positively impact the parasympathetic nervous system.

EskewDumezRipple’s renovation of an existing LWCC office brought plenty of light-colored wood into the space, contributing significantly to the interior’s light, airy feel. “The woods offered a nice contrast and also warmed up the space,” Mark Hash, architect at EskewDumezRipple, previously told gb&d.

Natural materials not only make for calm, welcoming environments but also help to improve overall sustainability by reducing a building’s embodied carbon. Organic materials like wood and bamboo, for instance, sequester carbon as they grow and store that carbon until they decompose. Inorganic natural materials like stone, on the other hand, produce fewer emissions during procurement and processing than, say, concrete or steel while also being incredibly long-lasting, reducing emissions associated with material replacement.

3. Recycled Materials

In addition to choosing natural materials, interior designers are also valuing recycled and reclaimed materials in modern office spaces. Such materials are not only often cheaper, they also help to reduce a project’s overall environmental footprint by reducing the need for new material extraction and potentially carbon-intensive manufacturing processes.

Designers working on new commercial workspaces can help offices incorporate recycled materials by reaching out to demolition contractors, local recycling facilities, and salvage yards to source reclaimed wood, brick, and tile for reuse as finishes and decoration. For businesses and companies moving or renovating their offices, this might look like reusing existing materials, fixtures, and furnishings from their old workspaces instead of purchasing all new products.

When HKS redeveloped an existing property into a new corporate hub for Gen Digital, they sourced 95% of the furniture from a company warehouse stocked with furnishings from previous Gen offices. With such a large supply of quality furniture at their disposal, the design team didn’t have to start over, Becky Laden, head of workplace experience at Gen Digital, previously told gb&d. “Employees were used to these things, and they were things we enjoyed.”

Workplace interiors can also incorporate existing materials by specifying products manufactured from recycled waste. Carpets made from Aquafil’s ECONYL regenerated nylon, for example, are much more sustainable and have a lower embodied carbon than conventional polyester carpets thanks to their being made from recycled plastics.

“ECONYL regenerated nylon is made from 100% waste instead of oil. For every 10,000 tons of ECONYL raw material, 70,000 barrels of crude oil are saved, and 65,100 tons of CO2 equivalent emissions are avoided,” Franco Rossi, president of Aquafil USA, previously wrote for gb&dPRO. “Using ECONYL yarn offers up to 90% reduction in global warming potential compared to nylon from fossil sources.”

4. Nontoxic Paints & Finishes

As employees and employers alike continue to place a greater emphasis on workplace wellness, it’s critical that interior designers select materials, paints, and finishes that won’t negatively impact occupant health by exposing them to known environmental toxins or dangerous volatile organic compounds (VOCs).

The easiest way to verify whether materials contain harmful chemicals or off-gas large amounts of VOCs is to look for eco-labels detailing the types and amounts of ingredients present in the finished product. The EPA manages a list of reliable labels, some of which include the Cradle to Cradle Certified Product Standard, Green Seal Certified Product Standard, GREENGUARD Certification, and VOC Green Certification Program. Products that have achieved Living Product Certification through the International Living Future Institute (ILFI) are also safe for use and do not contain any of the “worst in class” chemicals or ingredients included on the ILFI’s Red List.

When designing their new LEED Gold–certified Pittsburgh studio office, Perkins Eastman made it a point to prioritize materials that were free of hazardous substances—an unsurprising decision given that the firm is a signatory of AIA’s Architecture & Design Materials Pledge, an initiative that aims to inspire a positive shift in materials specification.

“For our new Pittsburgh studio, selecting materials that lived up to this pledge became a guiding principle and challenged our team to thoroughly research each product,” Jennifer Askey, an associate principal at Perkins Eastman, wrote in a previous gb&d article. “Over a dozen Red List-free products were specified, and all finishes were selected based on compliance with LEED v4 VOC content and emissions requirements, availability of Environmental Product Declarations, and meeting material ingredient reporting criteria.”

5. Daylighting

Lighting also plays an important role in creating safe, comfortable, productive, and aesthetically pleasing workspaces. Historically offices have relied heavily on artificial lighting for the majority of their lighting needs, but the designers of today are increasingly prioritizing natural sunlight as the primary source of illumination—both as a means of reducing energy usage and improving indoor environmental quality.

Large windows and window walls can be found lining the perimeter of many a modern office, while skylights, light shelves, light wells, and other innovative daylighting solutions have become sought-after methods for drawing sunlight deeper into a building’s interior. By increasing occupants’ exposure to sunlight throughout the day, these daylighting strategies help foster a healthy circadian rhythm, ultimately making for happier, more alert, and more productive employees.

This heightened focus on daylighting has even influenced changes to the layout, color palettes, and material selection of office interiors, as elements like open floor plans, light-colored paints, and reflective surfaces also help sunlight penetrate further into a building’s center, reducing the need for artificial lighting during daytime hours. By minimizing dependency on electric lighting, daylighting solutions help reduce an office’s electric lighting energy usage by anywhere from 20 to 80%.

When Pelli Clarke & Partners designed the new Salesforce Tower Chicago, they knew daylighting would be key to the project’s success as a biophilic, wellness-focused workspace. Floor-to-ceiling insulated glass from Viracon clads the entire building, maximizing daylight admittance while simultaneously preventing unwanted solar heat gain.

“It has a 38% solar energy reflectance, throwing off nearly 40% of the heat that would be cast into the building,” Darin Cook, partner at Pelli Clarke & Partners and lead architect for the project, previously told gb&d. “At the same time we’re really trying to spill daylight into the inside of the building, minimizing the amount of electrical lighting we have to provide when it’s nice and sunny. It’s simple, elegant architecture that is still very high-performance.”

6. Energy-Efficient Lighting

Most offices can’t rely exclusively on daylighting during all hours of operation and must supplement with artificial lighting when necessary—but seeing as lighting on average accounts for roughly 17% of a building’s energy use, making smart lighting choices is crucial to meeting green design goals.

“We try to use as little artificial light as possible, but when we do need it, it needs to be the most energy-efficient lighting fixture we can find,” Stephen Katz, a principal and technical director in Gensler’s Seattle office, previously told gb&d. LEDs have rapidly become the electric lighting of choice for sustainability-minded interior designers.

Compared to traditional fluorescents, LEDs are up to 80% more efficient and have much longer lifespans, meaning the emissions associated with the use phase of their life cycle are very low. Architectural lighting manufacturer Coronet LED takes the sustainability of their LEDs a step further by designing fixtures that are green from cradle to grave—a trait that has influenced Gensler’s choice to specify their products in a number of projects, including the Bialek Office & Showroom in Maryland.

7. Smart Lighting Controls

Beyond lights themselves, lighting controls also influence overall efficiency of a project. Most large commercial office buildings have long made use of building management systems to control when lights turn on and off, but it is only fairly recently that offices of all sizes have started incorporating automation and sensor technology into their LED lighting control systems to ensure electric lights only come on when needed.

“LEDs working in conjunction with light level and motion sensing, or occupancy technology, are allowing for intelligent application in every imaginable environment. These technologies react by adjusting light levels, consciously accounting for ambient light in a specific area occupied by turning on/off or dimming,” Robert Pullman, principal of Relation Lighting Agency and former national sales manager for Tivoli, previously wrote for gb&dPRO. “This not only saves money but reduces our carbon footprint and decreases our burden on the planet.”

Svigals + Partners, for example, used occupancy sensors when designing the Biohaven Pharmaceutical office to help reduce the building’s artificial lighting loads. “We used a programmable lighting system to control lighting during specific core business hours as well as occupancy sensors throughout,” Katherine Berger, associate and director of interior design with Svigals + Partners, told gb&d in a previous article. “The team utilized lighting calculations to ensure all workspaces have at least 20fc (footcandles) at the work surface and provided window shade systems and dimming switches that can be controlled by users to reduce glare and provide desired light levels.”