THE INTERVIEW: Kas Bordier, Co-founder of MAVI Longevity Home
We spend 90% of our lifetime at home, so why aren’t we designing them for better health?
The longevity market is peaking at a point where almost everything needed to improve future health feels readily available: GPS smartwatches, supplements personalised to individual conditions, and devices that detect the early signs of perimenopause. At times, it seems as though no stone has been left unturned in helping consumers optimise their health and wellbeing as the array of experiences and products shaping this space continues to grow.
Meanwhile, MAVI is quietly pulling focus towards somewhere that is often overlooked, yet where we spend the vast majority of our time (90%, in fact): the home. With her signature ethos of Interior Biology, Kas Bordier- alongside co-founder Shouka Amirsolimani- is designing commercial, workplace and residential spaces with longevity at the heart. Using research-led techniques and measurable metrics across sound, mould and light pollution, MAVI sits at the forefront of a movement that feels inevitable as it is exciting.
Decades ago, the imagined picture of a future forward home was a “smart home” using technology to operate blinds, windows and central heating. Fast forward to our current reality of climate change, synthetic materials flooding the mass market, and rising light and air pollution, and the idea of designing and building homes for longevity seems not only plausible but overdue.
We couldn’t wait to bring Kas in to discuss the connection she is forging between personal health and lifestyle, and the way our homes are built. Read on as we explore creating spaces for improved sleep (clue: it’s silence), VOC off-gassing, and why some hotels are still missing the mark when it comes to designing for better health.
“The home, where most people spend most of their lives, is the intervention nobody has addressed”- Kas Bordier, MAVI
Longevity is the buzzword du-jour within the health and wellbeing space, but the environment we live in is often overlooked. When did you first recognise that design and architecture needed to address health and wellbeing?
Later than I’d like to admit. I got seriously ill from mould inside a Singapore apartment that looked, by every conventional measure, completely fine. Even that didn’t do it. For years I remained in the supplements-and-biohacks camp, where most of the longevity conversation lives. Then I got involved with XPRIZE Healthspan and started encountering a different question entirely: what is the totality of environmental exposure doing to the human body across a lifetime? The answer is quite a lot. More than genetics. More than most things we consider serious medicine. Biology and architecture had simply never introduced themselves. I have been obsessed ever since.
In your practice, how do you work with your clients to achieve the best quality results?
We resist the obvious question. Most architects/designers ask “what do you want the space to look like?” We ask “what is this space currently doing to your biology?” Those are very different conversations. We assess 129 measurable factors before a single specification is made, which sounds laborious until you consider the alternative: spending significant sums on a home that looks magnificent but undermines your sleep, your immunity, and your cognitive function for the next thirty years. Our clients are people who apply rigour to every dimension of their lives: their performance, their health protocols, their investments, their biological age. We make sure the environment they return to every night is working just as hard as they are.
Have you adopted any core principles when it comes to designing for wellness?
Several, but if I’m honest I keep coming back to three. The dose makes the medicine: small, consistent environmental inputs outperform large, effortful interventions over time, behaviourally and biologically. A home that optimises your light, air, and acoustics every single day will do more for your long-term health than almost any supplement or treatment protocol. Everything must be measurable; if you can’t quantify it, you’re decorating. And luxury without biological function is just aesthetics with a premium price tag. The wellness industry knows a great deal about what you consume and surprisingly little about where you live. Our clients deserve both.
When designing or redesigning a space, what do you look at first?
Every project starts with the people living in it, their health goals, how they sleep, how they work, what they’re trying to protect or improve as they age. The space follows the biology, not the other way around. But if I had to pick one element I return to most, it’s light, biologically speaking (not aesthetics) Research is unambiguous: artificial lighting that misaligns with our circadian biology disrupts cortisol, suppresses melatonin, and fragments sleep in ways that compound over time into immune dysfunction and cognitive decline. Most homes are doing exactly this while looking exceptional on Instagram.
“Here’s what I know about our clients: they don’t want to be managed. They want to be solved. Sometimes solving it means removing what nobody else thought to look for.“- Kas Bordier, MAVI
What is the most overlooked part of design in traditional architecture and design that has a negative impact on health?
Indoor air quality, without question. We obsess over what we can see and completely ignore what we’re breathing. VOCs off-gassing from the beautiful finishes and adhesives. Particulates from soft furnishings. Biological contaminants from ventilation systems nobody has seriously interrogated in years. The industry has spent decades perfecting the visual experience of a space while the invisible environment, the one your lungs and nervous system interact with every single hour, is essentially an afterthought. Your immune system does not care about your design awards.
What has been the most unexpected thing you have implemented into a client’s space to support longevity?
Silence. A client had tried everything the wellness industry sells for sleep, and I mean everything, with the dedication of someone who treats their health as seriously as their portfolio. Nothing worked, because the problem wasn’t a deficiency. It was an intrusion. Low-frequency mechanical noise, completely inaudible at the level of conscious perception but measurable, was fragmenting their sleep architecture every night. We removed it structurally. The transformation was immediate. Here’s what I know about our clients: they don’t want to be managed. They want to be solved. Sometimes solving it means removing what nobody else thought to look for.
If you could resign any space, or notable building and redesign it to support wellbeing, what would it be?
The ultra-luxury hotel. (Don’t want to name names but we all know them 😉 ) You are paying four, five, six thousand pounds a night and the environment is still not quite right for your biology. The linen is impeccable, the service flawless. And yet the HVAC runs at frequencies that fragment sleep, the bathroom lighting fires blue wavelengths at your retinas at midnight, and the air recirculation hasn’t been seriously interrogated in years. You pay for the finest hospitality on earth and wake up with dysregulated cortisol. The gap between what guests are paying and what their biology is actually receiving is extraordinary. That gap is precisely where this work belongs next.
With longevity concepts on the rise, what does the future of your business look like?
The longevity industry is $4.6 trillion focused almost entirely on what you consume. The home, where most people spend most of their lives, is the intervention nobody has addressed, which, when you say it out loud, is a little absurd. MAVI is one part of the answer, genuinely. We work alongside extraordinary scientists, clinicians, and designers around the world, what we call MAVI & Friends, each solving pieces of this puzzle in their own disciplines. We connect the dots inside the spaces people actually live in. No small task, wildly good company.
© Higher Self Experience
