MEET TODAY’S GUEST
Saloni Mehta,
Architect & Interior Designer
We caught up with Saloni Mehta, a globally trained architect, interior designer, and urbanist whose work spans from cozy homes to vibrant workspaces and retail environments. With a master’s in Sustainable Systems Management, Saloni brings a thoughtful, people-first approach to design, crafting spaces that not only perform well but also feel good to live and work in.
We often talk about sustainability as an environmental problem - emissions, energy use, waste. But one of its most immediate and underexamined impacts is human health.
Humans spend nearly 90% of their lives indoors.
Homes, offices, schools, hospitals, these spaces are designed to protect us from the elements. Yet many of the materials inside them quietly introduce new risks of their own. Paints, adhesives, insulation, furniture, flooring - all can release chemicals into the air we breathe, sometimes at concentrations significantly higher than what we encounter outdoors.
This isn’t a fringe concern. Indoor air quality has been linked to respiratory and cardiovascular disease, developmental and prenatal health issues, and even impaired cognition, affecting how children learn and how adults focus, process information, and perform at work.
When we incorporate natural materials, we can transform the way it feels - often making it more calming and restorative.
Progress and the Pattern We Keep Repeating
This is not a story of stagnation. The building industry has made real progress. Lead-containing paints, asbestos, and formaldehyde-heavy wood products were once standard. Today, they are heavily restricted or phased out entirely. But there’s a deeper pattern worth naming.
Many of these materials entered the market as technological wins: durable, affordable, efficient. Their health consequences only became clear decades later, after widespread exposure. PFAS, certain flame retardants, plasticizers, and other persistent chemicals now follow a familiar arc: widely adopted first, understood much later.
The issue isn’t innovation itself. It’s that our ability to create materials has outpaced our ability to fully understand their long-term biological and environmental effects.
So the real question becomes: How do we continue to build and advance in the face of material uncertainty?
Designing Without The Full Picture
Interior designers sit at a difficult intersection. They are expected to create beautiful, functional spaces, often under tight budgets and timelines, while navigating an increasingly complex material landscape.
Designer Saloni Mehta describes this challenge plainly. Many conventional finishes like paints, carpets, adhesives, and furniture, still off-gas volatile organic compounds and other toxins. Indoor air pollution, she notes, is often worse than outdoor air, precisely because of these materials and limited ventilation. And since people spend most of their time inside, even low-level exposure compounds over time.
The challenge isn’t knowing everything. It’s knowing enough to make better decisions.
This is where material health shifts from a moral or aesthetic preference into a practical design constraint. We don’t need absolute certainty - we need systems that help us evaluate risk, prioritize safer alternatives, and reduce exposure where it matters most.
Healthy materials are often framed as a lifestyle upgrade. But for many people, they are anything but optional. Children in schools, patients in hospitals, renters in aging buildings, employees in offices… entire populations spend their days in spaces they didn’t choose and cannot meaningfully modify. Vulnerable and lower-income communities are often exposed to the highest concentrations of indoor pollutants with the fewest resources to mitigate them.
When material health is treated as a premium feature instead of a baseline, inequity becomes embedded in our interiors. Design, whether we acknowledge it or not, is a public health decision.
An Industry Waking Up
The good news is that this awareness is no longer limited to fringe conversations.
Interior materials are now being taken seriously at the standards level. LEED v5 places increased emphasis on material transparency, embodied impacts, and interior products, acknowledging that finishes, furnishings, and fit-outs play an outsized role in both emissions and occupant health. The International Living Future Institute’s Declare program pushes even further, requiring manufacturers to disclose ingredients and eliminate chemicals on the Red List altogether. Other frameworks, from Health (Environmental) Product Declarations to GREENGUARD certifications continue to expand the landscape of what “responsible” material selection means.
This is progress. But it introduces a new problem.
For designers and builders, the signal is clear, healthier materials matter. The difficulty lies in interpretation. Standards evolve. Criteria change. Disclosures vary in quality and format. What was considered acceptable five years ago may now be flagged as questionable.
The industry isn’t lacking information. It’s lacking coherence.
Too Much to Track, Too Little Time to Synthesize
Keeping up with material health today requires navigating technical reports, evolving certifications, and fragmented manufacturer data, all while delivering projects on time and on budget. The cognitive burden is real, and it grows with every new standard introduced. As standards evolve and data fragments, the challenge becomes structural rather than ideological. What resources will support designers in taking action with measurable impact?
Tools that make material data legible, comparable, and usable are necessary. reFern serves as our mission to translate complex sustainability and health disclosures into actionable insight, helping designers evaluate tradeoffs without being overwhelmed by raw data. In an industry faced with evolving constraints, accessibility may be the most important innovation of all.
A Smarter Way Forward
The goal is not to retreat from modern materials or halt progress. It’s to design with integrity, recognizing uncertainty and responding with better frameworks.
That often means:
Favouring simpler, inert, or truly natural materials
Avoiding substances with known or emerging health risks (VOCs, PFAS, heavy metals)
Demanding transparency through ingredient disclosures and health declarations
Designing for longevity, adaptability, and lower chemical load, and not just upfront cost
Sustainability, when practiced thoughtfully, becomes a form of future-proofing. It helps us respond not only to what we know today, but to what we may discover tomorrow.
Interior spaces shape our days in subtle but profound ways. They influence how we breathe, think, recover, and connect. The materials we choose today will define the health outcomes we confront years from now.
Credits:
This article was co-developed by Jessica Dulku, Ola Elkhatib, and Saloni Mehta, as part of reFern’s ongoing exploration of design that supports both people and the planet. 🌎
About reFern🌿
reFern empowers designers to build healthier, more sustainable environments by connecting them with conscious materials, transparent data, and like-minded local suppliers.
Enjoyed this piece? Join our newsletter to get updates.
1 Header Image credit: Laci_10, Shutterstock
