When my partner got the job offer in Minneapolis, I smiled and said all the right things. Great opportunity. Career advancement.
Better schools for Emma. But inside, I was quietly freaking out. We’d spent eight years making our Seattle home perfect—or as perfect as an always-in-progress biophilic experiment could be.
The thought of starting over felt like someone was asking me to abandon a living thing. Because in many ways, that’s exactly what our home had become. We had three months before the move, and I spent the first one in denial, the second in research mode, and the third in a whirlwind of implementation.
The rental we found in Minneapolis was… fine. A 1990s open-concept with beige everything and those generic oak cabinets everyone had back then.
The landlord seemed mildly alarmed when I asked about installing plant hangers from the ceiling, but he eventually agreed as long as we “didn’t go crazy.” Little did he know. Emma was 12 at the time and taking the move harder than anyone. She’d slam doors, disappear into her room for hours, and generally communicate in monosyllables punctuated by dramatic sighs.
My partner was stressed about the new job and the pressure to prove himself. I was trying to maintain my consulting business remotely while orchestrating this transition. We were, to put it mildly, not our best selves.
The first thing I installed in the new place—literally before the moving trucks arrived—was a living wall system in the entryway. Nothing fancy, just a modular setup with pothos, spider plants, and a few prayer plants. The delivery guys thought I was nuts, unloading soil and plants while they were bringing in furniture.
But I’d learned something important from our Seattle home: biophilic elements have their greatest impact at transition points. Doorways. Hallways.
Places where you shift from one state to another. That entryway wall became our first shared joy in the new place. Emma, despite her determined teenage angst, couldn’t help pausing to touch the leaves each time she came home.
My partner started arriving from work and taking deep breaths by the plants before diving into evening logistics. I hadn’t explicitly designed it as a decompression zone, but that’s what it became—a living buffer between outside stress and inside sanctuary. The kitchen was my next focus.
In Seattle, we’d had an elaborate window garden system that provided herbs year-round. Minnesota winters made that impossible, so I created what my partner now calls “the mad scientist corner”—a small hydroponics setup with grow lights on timers. The system itself wasn’t beautiful (though I’ve since upgraded it), but what it provided was crucial: living green things during those first brutal winter months when everything outside was dead or dormant.
Emma, to everyone’s surprise, appointed herself herb manager. She’d check pH levels and nutrients each morning before school, making little notes in a journal she kept by the setup. When asked about it, she’d shrug and say, “Plants don’t care if you’re new.” Fair enough.
Our living room presented the biggest challenge. Two solid walls, tiny windows, and a northern exposure that made it perpetually dim. In Seattle, we’d had floor-to-ceiling windows facing a lush backyard.
This felt like living in a cave by comparison. Rather than fight the cave-like quality, I leaned into it, drawing inspiration from studies on prospect-refuge theory in biophilic design. I installed a custom-built wooden slat ceiling feature that created dappled light patterns from strategically placed LED strips.
The effect mimicked sunlight through a forest canopy, constantly changing as the day progressed. For about $230 in materials (mostly reclaimed wood from a local salvage yard and some simple electronics), that ceiling transformed the entire emotional experience of the room. Visitors would actually stop mid-sentence when they walked in, their eyes drawn upward, their faces softening.
One of my partner’s colleagues—a stoic Midwesterner not given to effusive commentary—sat down during a dinner party and said, “This room feels like a hug.” Highest praise possible. The true test of our biophilic interventions came during that first winter. If you’ve never experienced a Minnesota January, it’s hard to explain how the combination of brutal cold, short days, and endless gray can affect your mental state.
We hit a family low point in early February. Emma’s grades were slipping. My partner was working late most nights.
I was struggling to maintain client relationships remotely. We were snapping at each other over nothing. The turning point came during a particularly nasty dinner argument that ended with Emma in tears and my partner and I in frigid silence.
Instead of retreating to separate corners of the house, though, we all somehow ended up in what we’d started calling the “forest room”—that living room with its dappled light ceiling. We hadn’t planned it. We just gravitated there.
After about twenty minutes of sitting in silence under that gentle, shifting light, Emma said, “I miss my friends.” Simple statement. Huge admission for a kid who’d been insisting she was “fine” for months. My partner put his work phone down and actually talked about how overwhelming the new position felt.
I finally admitted I was struggling with the loss of my in-person client network. None of these were revelations, exactly, but they were acknowledgments we’d been avoiding. Was it the room that facilitated that conversation?
Not entirely, of course. But the biophilic elements—the light quality, the natural materials, the living plants visible from where we sat—created conditions where vulnerability felt safer. There’s research supporting this: exposure to natural elements and patterns reduces cortisol levels and activates parasympathetic nervous system responses.
In non-science terms: nature helps us calm down and connect. Over the following weeks, we established a new family tradition. Forest Room Councils, Emma called them.
Twenty minutes, no phones, just sitting in that space together a few times a week. Sometimes we talked; sometimes we didn’t. The ritual itself became as important as any conversation it contained.
By spring, something had shifted in our family dynamic. The transition wasn’t complete—is it ever?—but we’d moved past the crisis stage. Emma had found a couple of friends who shared her newly discovered interest in plants.
My partner had set better boundaries at work. I’d established new client relationships locally. We weren’t thriving yet, but we were stabilizing.
As the weather warmed, I turned my attention to our small backyard. The landlord’s eyes got wide when I presented my plans, but the magic words “we’ll return it to original condition if needed” eventually won him over. We created a simple deck with a pergola structure draped in native vines, a small water feature that became home to a family of frogs Emma named after characters from her favorite books, and raised garden beds that gave us our first real taste of homegrown vegetables that summer.
The outdoor space transformed our experience of the house completely. What had felt like a temporary shelter became a genuine home. We started entertaining again.
Emma invited friends over without prompting. My partner began taking client calls from the pergola, reporting that his thinking felt clearer there. The most unexpected benefit came from the garden.
None of us had been vegetable gardeners in Seattle—our yard there was more ornamental. But the act of tending these plants together, watching them progress from seed to table, created a powerful metaphor for our own transplanted family. Emma, in particular, found meaning in the process.
“We’re like the tomatoes,” she announced one day, covered in dirt and surprisingly philosophical. “We got moved, but we’re growing anyway.” From a previously monosyllabic teenager, this was profound poetry. As we approach the three-year mark in Minneapolis, our rental has evolved far beyond those initial emergency interventions.
The landlord, initially skeptical, now brings prospective tenants by to see what’s possible with the space (we’re on a multi-year lease, thankfully). More importantly, the house has facilitated our transition from a family in crisis to one that has put down new roots. The biophilic elements that seemed like luxury additions—the things friends sometimes tease me about being “on brand” with my professional focus—proved to be essential infrastructure for our emotional well-being.
The living wall still stands in the entryway, though it’s more lush now. The forest ceiling continues to create its daily light patterns. The garden has expanded.
But their functions have evolved from emergency psychological support to ongoing enrichment. Would we have eventually adjusted without these interventions? Probably.
Humans are adaptable. But the quality of our transition—and the depth of our connection to each other through it—was profoundly shaped by the living systems we incorporated into our space. In creating a home that breathed, changed, and grew alongside us, we gave ourselves permission to do the same.
And in the end, that made all the difference.
