Wood in the room
In 2019 the architecture researcher Jingyun Shen put 20 adults through five neurobehavioural tests, first in wooden rooms and then in a concrete one. Completion times fell in the wooden rooms on every test: 16 seconds on visual reaction, 5 on continuous operation, 6 on the Stroop test, 16 on calculation and 7 on recognising meaningless pictures. Correct answers rose on all five as well. Asked where they would rather work, the participants chose a wooden room over the concrete one.
The economist Stephen Whyte took the question into a real workplace in 2025. 23 Australian office workers moved out of a concrete office and into a timber-rich one, and the team measured them with surveys and with cortisol from hair samples three months later. Self-rated productivity in the timber setting was 0.60 points higher, 5.10 against 4.50 on the survey scale, at p = 0.04 and a moderate effect size. Health rated 0.57 higher. Average hair cortisol fell from 317.2 to 286.4 picograms per milligram. Whyte calls the work a pilot and warns against generalising from 23 people.
The built environment researcher Rory Jones followed a single building for two years. The Enterprise Centre in the United Kingdom was built to biophilic principles throughout, and its permanent staff were surveyed 12 and 24 months after moving in, with 86 and 97% taking part. Satisfaction with temperature, acoustics, lighting and air held across both years. Self-reported productivity gains ran at 12.98% in the first year and 9.17% in the second.
The architecture researcher Heba Abdou surveyed Egyptian workplaces in 2025 and ranked the biophilic elements by how closely each tracked reported focus and creativity. Natural materials came first at r = 0.261, ahead of natural light. Water features came last and depended on the context.
The design researcher Junwen Lin looked for the mechanism below room scale, recording multi-channel EEG in 2026 while people handled textiles that varied in fibre and in dye. The more natural a material was perceived to be, the lower the physiological vigilance on the relative beta index, at β = −0.037. Plant-dyed yellow fabric tracked relaxation while chemically dyed yellow tracked arousal, which puts the material ahead of the colour.
Whyte calls it a pilot with 23 people. Shen’s 20 worked in a laboratory. Jones surveyed a building whose staff knew what it had been built to be.
The sources
- 5–16 sfaster completion on all five neurobehavioural tests in wooden rooms than in a concrete one, for 20 adults, with more correct answers on all five as well.Jingyun Shen et al., Perceptual and Motor Skills, 2019 · 10.1177/0031512519876395
- 5.10 vs 4.50self-rated productivity in the timber-rich office and in the office without timber, on a scale from 1 to 7 (p = 0.04), among 23 Australian office workers whose hair cortisol also fell from 317.2 to 286.4 pg/mg.Stephen Whyte et al., Scientific Reports, 2025 · 10.1038/s41598-025-22934-y
- 12.98%self-reported productivity gain among staff of a biophilic building 12 months after moving in, and 9.17% among the cohort surveyed at 24 months.Rory V. Jones et al., Journal of Building Engineering, 2025 · 10.1016/j.jobe.2025.113476
- first of 12biophilic elements ranked against reported focus and creativity in Egyptian workplaces: the presence of natural materials at r = 0.261, water features last.Heba M. Abdou and Menna Mounir Abd-Elhafez, Journal of Umm Al-Qura University for Engineering and Architecture, 2025 · 10.1007/s43995-025-00249-3
- The more natural a textile was perceived to be, the lower the physiological vigilance on the relative beta index of the EEG (β = −0.037). Plant-dyed fabrics went with relaxation where chemically dyed ones of the same colour went with arousal.Junwen Lin et al., Materials Today Advances, 2026 · 10.1016/j.mtadv.2026.100785
Findings compiled by The Built Review