Our Approach

Art, Stress, and Recovery

A 2025 scoping review of 68 studies on viewing visual artwork in healthcare settings, covering more than 6,000 patients, staff, and visitors, found it was associated with reduced heart rates, improved reported mental health outcomes, and greater well-being for patients, plus increased well-being and sense of belonging for staff. A separate 2026 museum-based study measured subjective stress and well-being before and after art viewing; it found the experience lowered participants' perception of their stress levels and raised their view of their well-being, most notably for people who started out most stressed. Both build on an earlier, widely cited 1984 study in the journal Science, which found that surgical patients with a window view of trees recovered almost a full day faster, needed fewer strong pain medications, and had fewer negative comments in nurses’ notes than patients facing a brick wall (Ulrich, 1984). Follow-up research found a similar effect from representational nature artwork alone. University Hospital in San Antonio put this into practice at scale: architecture firm Perkins&Will documented its Design Enhancement and Public Art program, roughly $6 million and more than 1,200 works from 275+ artists, placed almost entirely in patient- and staff-facing public areas.

Contemporary Art vs. Traditional Landscape Imagery

Much of the “evidence-based design” movement in healthcare leans toward naturalistic and landscape imagery, following the tradition established by Ulrich's window-view research above. That's a defensible, well-supported choice, but it's not the only credible one. Cleveland Clinic's Arts & Medicine Institute, widely regarded as the largest and most comprehensive hospital art program in North America, deliberately built a museum-caliber contemporary collection instead, more than 7,000 works spanning emerging, mid-career, and established artists, specifically to avoid what its curators call the “wallpaper effect” of generic landscape art. In a published account of the program, curator Jennifer Finkel notes candidly that no rigorous study has actually shown any particular art style or period is more or less beneficial to patients than another. Cleveland Clinic's approach is grounded instead in consistent, positive patient and visitor response to work that provokes thought, offers levity, or provides genuine distraction, deployed at both its flagship campus and its community hospitals. It's a useful case for clients weighing a nature-forward collection against a more contemporary one: both are legitimate, evidence-honest choices, and the right one depends on the population and goals for the space.

Biophilic Design

Biophilic design brings natural elements, light, materials, and imagery into a built environment. Systematic reviews of hospital settings link biophilic design, including artwork, to reduced hospitalization time, lower pain levels, and reduced stress for both patients and care providers, with measurable drops in cortisol and other stress markers.

Neuroaesthetics and Neuroarts

Neuroaesthetics studies how the brain and body respond to art and aesthetic experience. An fMRI study found that viewing art rated as beautiful activates the medial orbitofrontal cortex, the brain's reward and pleasure center, giving the aesthetic experience of art a measurable neural signature (Ishizu & Zeki, 2011). In 2019, the World Health Organization published a scoping review of more than 900 publications and 3,000 studies on arts and health, concluding that the arts have a demonstrable role in both preventing illness and supporting treatment. The Johns Hopkins International Arts + Mind Lab and the Aspen Institute followed with the NeuroArts Blueprint (2021), a framework connecting this research to real-world health and wellness practice.

Art, Movement, and Motivation

In fitness and spa settings specifically, the more direct research isn't about nature exposure generally, it's about what happens when people watch or engage with art depicting movement and physical action. Action observation and motor imagery research has found that watching or imagining physical movement activates overlapping regions of the brain to those used in performing the movement itself, a mechanism increasingly used in athletic training and motor rehabilitation. It's part of the evidence base for why we think about art depicting motion, form, and the body as a deliberate design choice in fitness and spa environments.

Art and the Guest Experience

A 2026 mixed-methods study in the International Journal of Tourism Research (Wang et al.), built on 15 guest interviews and a 268-person survey across luxury hotels, found that guests' engagement with hotel art, described as attention-holding, cognitive enquiry, and emotive immersion, is directly linked to their overall hotel experience. It's one of the clearer empirical links between art and guest experience in the hospitality literature. Gensler's Hospitality Experience Index, a multiyear research effort combining ethnographic research with a 1,200-person guest survey, backs this up from the trend side: commissioning original, locally-rooted art is named as a defining move in next-generation hotel design, part of a broader shift toward culturally distinctive, non-uniform environments. The same research found a real opportunity: 87% of guests report satisfaction with a stay, but only 38% say it exceeded expectations and only 40% would recommend the property. Most hotels are hitting satisfactory, not memorable.

Art, Property Value, and Economic Impact

Analysis from the Americans for the Arts and the Urban Land Institute has tied public art investment to measurable increases in adjacent property value. The American Planning Association puts a range on that effect: public art installations have been shown to raise surrounding property values by 20 to 35 percent. That lift extends beyond real estate, too — ArtPlace America's research found that public art draws more foot traffic and generates more economic activity nearby, a direct benefit for any business that owns or operates commercial property in the area.

Looking specifically at murals, a 2025 study of Cincinnati neighborhoods (Jeong & Hu, published in the journal Cities) found murals were linked to significantly higher foot traffic and to faster increases in income, rent, and home values between 2010 and 2020. The researchers are upfront that this is correlational, not causal, and flag a real risk: the same revitalization effect can drive up costs enough to displace the residents and artists who made the area appealing in the first place, so it's critical that public art be implemented thoughtfully, with equitable impact top of mind.

Art and Workplace Engagement

A University of Exeter study led by Dr. Craig Knight and Professor S. Alexander Haslam compared employee performance across bare, art-and-plant “enriched,” and self-arranged office environments. Employees in enriched offices were up to 32% more productive and reported 45% greater well-being and 60% greater engagement than those in a stripped-down, tools-only workspace.

Community, Public Art, and Social Cohesion

A 2025 integrative review in Frontiers in Public Health examined the relationship between arts participation, social cohesion, and well-being, finding that community-engaged art builds social cohesion and, in turn, supports collective well-being, a finding increasingly used by public health researchers looking at social isolation and community health.