5 hours ago
1
With all due respect to biohackers, forget huffing Huel or popping supplements: The simplest shortcut to a long life might already be on hand, right at home. Indeed, it’s bricks and mortar that could make the difference between hitting 90 or missing out. The World Health Organization’s data suggests that 80 percent of health outcomes relate to your environment — in other words, what surrounds you matters far more for your well-being than whatever’s in your genes. Austin-based biohacker Kayla Barnes-Lent has already embraced that idea, touting the $3 million she spent on her so-called “longevity home.” Design that foregrounds longevity isn’t just smart for your health, though; it’s a canny financial move, too. The Global Wellness Institute predicts that wellness-infused real estate will be a $1.1 trillion market by 2029, and premium homes with a wellness focus already command a 10 percent price difference versus conventional luxury property. “We need to move from longevity intervention to longevity infrastructure,” says Kas Bordier, a consultant in the space with startup Mavi.
Developers and designers are moving into the market: California-based Moses Hershko, who has built homes for Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger, among others, just completed an 18,000-square-foot, seven-bedroom mansion in San Francisco. He calls the $65 million home a “Longevity Estate”; every aspect of its construction was aimed at health optimization, incorporating such features as blue-light mitigation and circadian lighting systems.
Bryan Wilkey is part of the team at L.A.-based Peter Dunham interiors; the firm’s renowned for its work with A-listers like Julia-Louis Dreyfus, Jennifer Garner and Hilary Swank. He’s seeing increasing emphasis on proactive wellness in clients’ wish lists, as with a recent customer who was keen to rid her bedroom of EMF, or Electro-Magnetic Frequencies, which some studies suggest interfere with sleep. Cue EMF-baffling wire mesh installed behind the upholstery on walls — discreet but functional. Wilkey describes such biophilic, health-enhancing tricks as “an invisible layer of design.”
Other homes, though, are less coy about their purpose as an active, built environment. Dr. Sabine Donnai runs the world-renowned longevity clinic Viavi. Patients sign up for her ongoing support for their health, via extensive regular checkups at Viavi’s central London premises, but they also often ask Donnai to advise them on how, and where, they live — it’s the health of the building she’s testing in that case rather than that of the humans who live there. Take one of her clients, a 40-something biohacking businessman who was struggling to rein in some of his hormonal readings. He already had a gym, hyperbaric chamber and more at each of his four homes, but Sabine quickly clocked what else he needed: a breathing room. “It’s a space that I feel people are missing most of these days,” she adds. “Our clients know the benefits of exercise — what they forget is that you need to bring in the calm.”
“We went through the house to find any space that clearly says to your physiology that there is nothing there — no demands, no gym, no TVs,” says the Belgium-born Donnai, who has expertise in both allopathic and complementary medicines. This particular client, she notes, often conducted meetings from his gym, walking on the treadmill while checking multiple screens for news. “I wanted him to have a space to go and find his calm.” The result: He redecorated a small box room exactly to her decorative prescription, with an earthy color palette, plus textured carpet and rugs — some soft and others rough, mimicking the variety in nature — plus soft pillows scattered around the floor. After a few months spending 20 minutes a day there chasing Zen, he was so impressed by its impact that he retrofitted one into his remaining homes around the world.
Donnai’s architectural consulting is just one part of her practice, but there are now dedicated healthy home consultants whose entire mission lies in ensuring that bricks and mortar bolster your lifespan. Mavi’s Kas Bordier is one of such experts, most of whom call themselves environmental architects; she stresses she has no medical qualifications of her own but rather has honed her interest in the field through personal passion. Bordier says her 3-year-old startup is already working with developers to incorporate proactive wellness features into plans for residential towers. One signed deal is with a group in Panama, which is also a hotspot for stem cell research and treatment.
Bordier and her ilk focuses on the so-called exposome. Think of this as the external complement to the genome: The latter represents your heritable strength and weaknesses, while the former encompasses what happens to you throughout your life, from air pollution exposure to stress. Bordier and her cohort believe proactive interventions in the exposome can make meaningful improvements in longevity. For a client who was struggling with sleep — one of the crucial elements in healthy aging — Bordier swept in and analyzed the perimenopausal woman’s bedroom. There was far too much light pollution, she observed, well above the 50 lux that starts interfering with melatonin production, so she swapped out conventional bulbs with circadian-aligned options from Ray Lighting — full-spectrum and flicker-free, they mimic the shift in the sun’s rays. Gone were the shiny, artificial fiber bedsheets and glossy walls, swapped out for natural fibers and zero volatile-organic-compound lime paint; this instantly reduced off-gassing, chemicals leaking into the air as interior pollutants. Perhaps the immortality-maxxers should focus less on supplements and plasma transfusions, and more on the sheets they’re sleeping in.
This story appears in The Hollywood Reporter’s July 2026 issue “The New Face of Hollywood.” Click here to read more.
English (US) ·