12 Wellness Design Tips From Gorgeous Yoga Studios

Wellness spaces can provide great design inspiration. Mirror a few design moves from some of the most stunning studios in the country — and we’ll explain the science behind what makes them feel so magical.

Classes are in session once again (the team at Richmond, Virginia’s lovely BareSOUL Yoga and Wellness, pictured here, is now teaching in person throughout their city), but there’s no reason that beatific balance you feel in child pose can’t infuse your space all the time.

If you’re looking to bring just a sprig or two of the outdoors in, collecting foliage and blooms on a walk around the neighborhood and displaying them in a vase can bring a room to life. If you’re ready for a major connection to your environment, consider this stunning yoga studio at the Ranch Creek Spa at Devil’s Thumb Ranch, a resort in the Colorado Rockies. Along with sweeping views of the Continental Divide, this space’s interior boasts walls and beams that were constructed from local beetle-kill pine and recycled spruce flooring. Looking to revamp a significant surface at your place? Exotic woods and stones are lovely, but it’s hard to beat the soulful feel of materials that are already at home in your area.

Set an explicit intention for a relaxing room by illustrating your goals with a striking visual. This series of serene and oceanic abstract panels inspired by the Pacific Northwest sets the tone for gatherings at Bohemian Studios’ West Seattle classroom. “We wanted the space to feel welcoming, like you were stepping into a dear friend’s living room,” director Miranda McRae explains. “Our beautiful mural encompasses all the reasons why we come together in the space: empowerment, positivity, movement and connection.”

The aptly-named Green Yogi studio in Berkeley, California features both smooth, uninterrupted surfaces and a mantel that comes to life with lush trailing plants. “Our minimalistic space is meant to serve as a calming refuge from the busy world. Decluttering translates to quieting the noise of the mind and in turn living with more presence, fulfillment and serenity,” owner Nasiem Sanjideh says.

You don’t need to have a green thumb to enjoy the benefits of plants, mind you. “From a psychological perspective, fake plants are just as good as real plants — as long as you get good fakes,” says Sally Augustin, Ph.D., an environmental/design psychologist and author of Designology: How to Find Your Place Type & Align Your Life With Design. “In a place where you want to relax, you want to have a couple of plants that are a couple of feet tall.”

“Natural light is like a magic medicine for humans, as long as you’re talking about glare-free light,” Dr. Augustin says. “If the natural light you’re experiencing causes glare, then that makes you tense and stressed out, and that’s no good for your mental health.” There’s no shortage of organic illumination in the sun-kissed studio at Power Yoga Palm Springs, where breezy window treatments filter extra-strength desert light.

Power Yoga Palm Springs owner Kim Funkey suggests imbuing a room like this one with evocative scents. “A diffuser with essential oils helps to set the mood; there are a variety of oils for a calming aroma [such as] lavender or eucalyptus or an uplifting scent like lemon or grapefruit,” she notes. Dr. Augustin concurs: “Individuals can have positive associations with particular scents. As an alternative to [a relaxing scent like] lavender they can decide to introduce those into the environments where they want to really boost their mental health. Think back to positive memories and see if there’s any smell linked to them, and you can try to use those smells in your home."

At Knot Springs, a wellness-focused social club in downtown Portland, Oregon, yoga class attendees find themselves in a space that’s both decidedly industrial — featuring raw concrete architecture and floor-to-ceiling city views — and undeniably cool. What makes this room appealing? It’s under the mats. “Seeing hardwood brings our stress levels down,” Dr. Augustin explains.

That said, there’s such a thing as too much of a good thing. “You don’t want all the surfaces around you to be featuring wood grain,” Dr. Augustin continues. “That gets to be overpowering, and can contribute to visual clutter. There seems to be a magic percentage: you don’t want more than 50 percent of the surfaces in a room to be hardwood.” In other words, pulling up old carpet to reveal the planks beneath it and bidding a long-overdue farewell to the wraparound '70s paneling in your living room are both solid moves.

In San Diego, Rancho Valencia Resort & Spa’s showstopping Serenity Yoga Pavilion enjoys views of the resort’s lush greenery in three directions. Why not a serene experience with water and views in four directions? “If you really, really, really want to decompress, you want to be situated in a way so that, in primitive-human terms, your back is protected but you have a view out over the world around you,” Dr. Augustin says. “The modern version of that would be like sitting in a high-backed chair with a view of the door. In a space where you’re really going to relax, have a place where the primary user of the space can sit in a way that nothing can approach them from the rear.” If you’ve got a sectional in the middle of your room, place a plant behind it to create a buffer between where you’ll be perched and where others are walking.

Salvage a dairy barn, rebuild it in the middle of a meadow on Martha’s Vineyard and… you’ve pretty much scored the ideal arrangement for wellness. “With the three double doors wide open, the sun shining, and a warm summer breeze blowing, you can’t help but open your heart," says Yoga Barn owner Scarlet Johnson.

A meadow happens to be Dr. Augustin’s sonic suggestion for relaxation. “If you think about [relaxing with] sound, people tend to think about putting on music in their home — but as it turns out a nature soundscape will be even more restful to you and will contribute even more to mental refreshment,” she says. “Just Google phrases like ‘nature soundscape,’ and the ones that will do the most for you from a psychological perspective would be reminiscent of a meadow on a lovely spring day, [with] sounds such as burbling brooks, leaves and grasses in quiet winds, birds singing and so on.”

Gargantuan windows at Modo Yoga NYC’s West Village location offer one of New York City’s prettiest views (it’s across the street from Jefferson Market Library) and illustrate how natural light can guide how we think about lighting design in our homes. “Warm light that’s going to help you relax [should] be down relatively low in the room — like in a lamp that sits on a tabletop, for example,” Dr. Augustin explains. “[At] sunrise and sunset the sun is relatively low, and it’s also warm colored at those times. And cooler, more intense light is best overhead, or somehow appearing to come from a position that would be similar to where the sun is at noon. Because at noon is when the light in our world is the coolest. So warm light: low, cool light: high, and if you think about sunrise and sunset and noon that’s a mnemonic device.”

Elise Patterson — a buyer at Shades of Light, a home decor retailer — agrees with Dr. Augustin. “Warm light is cozy and intimate,” she says. “It creates a feeling of closeness and draws people together, which is why it's often used in yoga studios. To recreate this feeling at home, we like to use bulbs with warmer color temperatures, especially in bedrooms where relaxing and unwinding is incredibly important. Gathering places like living rooms and dining rooms can also be used for respite and therefor benefit from soft mood lighting. But, since these spaces aren’t exclusively used for relaxation, we recommend installing lights on dimmers so color temperature and intensity can be adjusted as needed.”

“Colors that are not very saturated but relatively light are relaxing for us to look at, put us in a good mood and calm us down,” Dr. Augustin explains. “Like sage green with lots of white mixed into it. I often recommend that people go to a green because research has shown that seeing different shades of green enhances our creative performance. After green — my very first choice — I would suggest a smoky, light-colored blue: blues are good because in our society we associate them with restfulness. We also link them to thoughts of things like competence, trustworthiness, credibility and things like that, so it can be great to have the wall behind you when you’re on a Zoom call painted blue.”

Industry experts like Erika Woelfel, vice president of color and creative services at Behr, are equally enamored with those hues: Behr’s 2022 Color of the Year is Breezeway, a gentle silvery green. “When we create safe spaces for our mental wellbeing, whether it be a nook for reading or journaling, or a room for yoga and meditation, choosing soothing and grounding hues like greens and blues helps instill a sense of calmness and peace,” she says. “Nature-inspired greens help center us as they remind us of rest and renewal, while blues help calm and quiet the mind.”