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Designers Relate Conscious Yoga Lifestyle to Green Interiors

People do yoga because it is relaxing, it improves your health and it’s all about feeling good. Mindfulness is part of that lifestyle – being conscious of your life and what you are doing each moment. The Boulevard spoke with two women – one in NY and one in LA – who both feel that when it comes to green interior design, the same ideas come into play.

Cheryl Terrace runs Vital Design, LTD. She has provided “conscious design” to clients in New York and Long Island for many years and is proud to have been at the forefront of eco-friendly interiors. An avid yoga devotee, Cheryl brings the yoga mindset to her work. Primarily, this means being conscious of what you are doing, mindful of the choices you make in your home and how they might affect the earth. But the whole effort is about being true to yourself. It should make you happy.

“I don’t do guilty,” Cheryl explained. “There’s no ‘tsk tsk tsk.’ Green design should come from a place of love.” The yoga mindset involves honoring your individuality. It means being conscious of your place in things and acting from the heart. It is a decision about who you are and how you behave in this world. “And I truly believe when you make heartfelt decisions, you make the right decisions – whether it is your choices in food, in relationships or in your home.”

What are the choices that require awareness? Cheryl tries to be conscious of where materials and furniture come from and if they were made in an ecologically responsible way. If an item is “green” but is shipped long distances, does the related pollution offset the environmental benefit? Can you re-use something that will be otherwise thrown away? “You have to know what is important to you,” she said.

Approaching design this way has helped her clients arrive in spaces that make them happy and comfortable. They establish a “sacredness” in their homes.

In an East Hampton kitchen renovation, Cheryl found responsible Amish woodworkers who could provide beautiful walnut cabinets that did not “off-gas” toxins into the air. All the lower cabinets, in fact, were made from just one tree. The backsplash was made from recycled glass. For the counters, she chose CaesarStone, a sustainable, eco-friendly quartz.

  Repurposing and using local items is also key. On an Upper East Side project, clients were moving into the city and were optimistic about scaling down. “But one thing they were going to miss was their fireplace,” said the designer. So Cheryl salvaged a discarded mantle and created a faux fireplace. Combined with neutral Tibetan rugs, sustainable Jatoba flooring and linen sofas, the green effort resulted in an elegant and inviting room.

Kim Nadel, principal at Niche Design with offices in NY and LA, has also been at the forefront of green design. She taught its principles at the New York School of Interior Design, co-authored a designer’s guide to eco-friendly materials, The Green Pages, and was chosen by Hospitality Design magazine as a leader in the industry for her positive influence. 

 Kim too sees the correlation between the yoga lifestyle and green design. Her work was actually included in a book about decorating based on Vedic and Vastu principles. This is a holistic decor system, meant to create inner peace. “It is basically yoga for the home,” she explained. “I was told that I was doing it intuitively, bringing harmony and balance into a room.”

She also believes in designing with consciousness, bringing up the same questions as Cheryl when beginning a project.

Kim learned a lot firsthand when she was hired to create the model apartment in Battery Park’s Millennium Tower Residences, NY’s first eco-friendly condos.

“We needed a bar stool to go along with what we were designing in the kitchen,” she explained, “We could not find one. There was nothing environmentally responsible. So I designed one that would fit.” From there she created some tables and benches based on the design and now she’s selling the whole line to raise awareness. They’re produced both in NY and LA to eliminate pollution from long-distance trucking.

 The experience helped raise Kim’s awareness. “People say the food you eat the most of, you want to be organic. Similarly, in the places you spend the most time, you want to be conscious: If a product you’re putting in there has wood, where did it come from? If it has a filling, what is it? Is it toxic? And you want to figure out how something can have the longest life possible. We’re trying to get away from being such a throwaway society.”

To achieve this and great design at the same time, Kim creatively combines natural and recycled materials. In one home, concrete flooring was a good natural way to go. Then the inspiration hit to throw in scraps of copper that came from plumbers’ excess pieces. Ground up, it added a beautiful sparkle to the floor.

In the Hamptons and Montauk, she noticed a lot of waste from surfboards. Kim figured out a way to shred up the fiberglass and use it as a non-toxic filler in concrete.

Along with concrete, glass and stone are big inspirations. Kim was recently struck by Bombay Sapphire’s blue bottle. She found a major hotel in the area that went through a lot of gin and has someone collecting empties. So there is a local source for materials and something that would be wasted is getting reused. “I am using the glass in concrete furniture pieces,” she explained. “It is a really beautiful glass and an eco-friendly solution. It looks like a jewel collection coming out in the concrete.”

Speaking of jewels, Kim’s thoughts on stone seem to sum up the whole conscious mindset behind green design. “I love designing with stone. Stone reminds me of a jewel,” she shared. “It is natural and beautiful. Once it is quarried out, it is one of a kind. It is not renewable in that sense. Once you take it out, that’s it. It is very precious, so I try to use it wisely.” 

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