One is hard-pressed to avoid talk of climate change in a world where biodiversity is increasingly at risk and global temperatures continue to inch ever-higher. It should therefore come as no surprise that people are turning their homes into literal oases, using indoor plants to transform city rooms into lush paradisiacal isles of greenery. This is because plants are both an important design feature and a way of taking control of your own microcosm.
Houseplants Are Transformational for Urban Dwellers
Particularly for the urban dweller, who is besieged with sounds and smells over which they have no control, one’s home is often the only environment over which one can exercise complete control. Insofar as indoor plants can actually improve your health, those succulents you’ve been seeing in every Instagram-ready interior on one of your friend’s social media feed are actually a form of self-care as much as they are a design feature. By selecting living decorations you can choose to clean the air of your immediate environment of toxins and decorate your room at the same time.
Indoor Gardens Are Self-consciously Sustainable
Moreover, you can make a conscious decision to make sustainable choices while filling your home with furniture–and plants. Really, in 2019, there is no reason that the one can not both live a sustainable, environmentally friendly lifestyle, and, at the same time, enjoy beauty and elegant design. Certainly interior designers like Jennifer Fisher of J Fisher Interior Design increasingly are seeing themselves as not just stewards of spaces, but also curators of lifestyles. Fisher, for example, readily acknowledges that her veganism influences her design choices. By choosing eco-friendly furniture and plants appropriate to your climate, you can work with nature to design a beautiful space to live in.
But just as much as they are sustainable choices to fill your room with a healthy pop of color, houseplants can also be literally aspirational, a statement of the eco-friendly world we would like to inhabit. Just as they did in the Victorian era, today’s urban young professionals are seeking to transform their immediate environments in ways that throw their homes into sharp relief against the crowded, and increasingly overheated, cities in which they live. In a move reminiscent of the first iteration of back-to-nature environmental consciousness in the 1970s, young people are once again transforming their homes into miniature jungles.
