Urban Jungle Interior Design: Greens, Woven Shades and How to Light Them

Urban jungle interior design comes down to three things: deep greens laid over warm browns, woven plant materials such as rattan and cane, and light that is filtered, warm and low. The third one is what separates a planted room that lasts from a party decoration, and it is the one nobody bothers to explain.

Search “jungle decor” from the UK and the first page is mostly a children’s party: a children’s jungle bedroom, safari balloon kits, shopping listings and pinboards of paper vines. Exactly one interiors page reaches page one, and it is about the urban jungle. That is the version this guide covers, the one that stays up all year.

Three looks share the name jungle decor

Three different intentions use the same vocabulary. Knowing which one you are in avoids most of the mistakes.

• The urban jungle. Plants make the room, not patterns: pale or deep green walls, plain furniture, natural fibres, twenty to forty pots in different sizes. The easiest version to live with, and the hungriest for daylight.
• The tropical print. The foliage is drawn rather than grown: panoramic wallpaper, big leaf cushions, botanical prints. Real plants become an extra, and the room dates faster.
• The jungle party. Balloons, cardboard animals, plastic palm leaves. Fine for a birthday, but nothing in it is built to last.

Four details tip a planted room into the temporary camp: glossy plastic palm leaves laid flat on a surface, the same exotic animal repeated from a cushion to a print to a mug, an apple green that exists in no wood anywhere, and a single ceiling light in the middle of the ceiling, which flattens the plants and kills every shadow. That last one takes up half of this guide.

The palette: greens laid over warm browns

A wood is not green. It is green and brown, and the proportion makes the style: greens in large blocks, warm browns underneath, very little else.

The greens that hold have yellow or grey in them: sage, olive, khaki and eucalyptus among the pale shades, fir, bottle and English green among the deep ones. Blue greens, mint and duck egg belong to other styles and go flat the moment the light turns warm. The browns come from materials rather than paint: natural rattan, oiled pale timber, walnut, terracotta, tan leather. The accents fit on one hand: ecru and linen on fabric, brass on metal, matt black on frames. Keep roughly 60 per cent dominant, 30 per cent secondary, 10 per cent accent.

The pairings themselves fill a guide of their own: what colour goes with green explains why a green never behaves the same way twice.

Rattan, cane, bamboo and woven fibre in front of a bulb

Four materials hide behind “natural fibre”, and they do not do the same job in front of a bulb.

• Rattan is the stem of a climbing palm, solid right through and pliable once heated. It is bent into structures: lamp bases, shade frames, chairs.
• Cane is the bark of that same rattan, split into strips and woven into a regular grid. It gives the open, perforated surfaces, and it filters light better than anything else here.
• Bamboo is a hollow, rigid stem that will not bend. It is worked in straight sections, which is where slatted pendants come from.
• Jute, willow and raffia are coarser, matt fibres that soak light up instead of letting it through. Excellent underfoot and in baskets, disappointing as a shade.

One rule follows. In front of a bulb, choose an open weave, cane or spaced slats. Under the light, on the floor or in a basket, choose a matt fibre for texture. Our rattan pendant light and natural fibre pendant light ranges cover both families, while the slat shades in our wooden pendant light range throw sharp rays across the ceiling rather than a soft halo.

Filtered light is the real signature of the look

Here is what no urban jungle page tells you, however many ideas it lists. What makes woodland recognisable is neither its colour nor its plants, it is its light: it arrives in patches, comes from several directions, draws cut out shadows, and stays warm because it has passed through leaves. One opal ceiling light in the middle of your ceiling does the opposite, a flat even wash with no direction and no shadow.

Three settings rebuild it at home.

• An open shade, never a closed diffuser. Cane, timber slats and loose weaves let part of the output through and hold the rest back, so the light leaves the fitting as a pattern. Opal glass rubs every pattern out.
• Three sources instead of one, and lower down. A pendant over the table, a wall light behind a large leaf, a lamp on the floor inside a planter. A fitting placed behind a plant throws its shadow across the wall, the most striking effect in the style and the cheapest. Where the ceiling rose sits in the wrong place for that, our guide to the off centre ceiling light covers moving it without touching the wiring.
• Distance to the wall sets the sharpness. The closer the shade sits to a surface, the smaller and crisper the shadow; the further away, the larger and softer. A clear filament bulb draws a sharp pattern, an opal bulb a gentle halo. Whether you can turn that pattern down at all is decided by a third line on the box: our guide explains the dimmable meaning and where to check it.

For fittings made with that in mind, see our jungle pendant light selection. The same logic of fibre and low light, with a quieter palette, runs through our guide to japandi style.

2,700 K and CRI 90: what the bulb does to your greens

Green is the least stable colour in decorating: it depends almost entirely on the source lighting it. Two figures, printed on every bulb box, decide the result. Colour temperature, in kelvins, gives the tint. At 2,700 K the spectrum holds plenty of red and orange and little blue, which is what saturates rattan and terracotta; the downside is set out in our comparison of cool white vs warm white, because it greys out the cold greens. The colour rendering index, written Ra or CRI, says how faithfully a lamp renders colour on a scale running to 100, and it decides whether your foliage looks alive or plastic.

What you are lighting	Under 2,700 K, Ra 80	Our advice
Bright green foliage	Dull, slightly grey	Ra 90 at least, 2,700 or 3,000 K
Sage or olive wall	Holds well, its yellow is saturated	2,700 K without reservation
Fir or bottle green wall	Darkens and swallows the light	Double the lumens, keep 2,700 K
Rattan, cane, pale timber	Gain warmth and relief	2,700 K is their best light
Terracotta and brass	Come alive, which is the point	Do not go above 3,000 K

For a planted room we recommend 2,700 K everywhere, Ra 90 or better, and more lumens rather than more kelvins if it feels dark. Going up to 4,000 K to see the green properly is the commonest false good idea: the room becomes accurate, and cold.

What your plants actually get in a British room

Are your lights helping your plants? The honest answer is no, and one order of magnitude settles it.

By day, under an overcast sky, a plant on the window sill gets 2,000 to 10,000 lux. A metre into the room only 500 to 2,000 are left, and three metres back, 100 to 300 lux. In the evening, under a ceiling light, it gets 50 to 150 lux for four or five hours. The gap between the sill and the back wall is a factor of twenty to fifty, and no decorative fitting closes it. The kind of light matters too, since a plant only uses radiation between 400 and 700 nm, and an LED at 2,700 K holds little blue.

British daylight sharpens the point. Met Office averages run from around 1,200 hours of sunshine a year in parts of Scotland to over 1,700 on the south coast of England, and in late December the sun is above the horizon for under eight hours in London and barely seven in Edinburgh, much of that behind cloud. A deep Victorian terrace or a north facing back room loses more again. So move the plant, not the lamp: big leaves near the glass, tolerant species at the back. A hall with no window at all is the extreme version of that problem, and our guide to narrow hallway lighting ideas works through what to fit in one.

Which leaves the opposite solution, often the better one: instead of lighting your plants, make them part of the fitting. A planter pendant puts the foliage at eye level and sends its beams down onto the table. Trailers take to it very well: pothos, ivy, string of hearts, tradescantia.

Urban jungle interior design: your questions answered

Sources

• Illuminance, Lux and Light meter, encyclopaedic articles. Orders of magnitude for indoor illuminance. Wikipedia
• Rattan, Caning and Bamboo, encyclopaedic articles. Origin and working of woven plant materials. Wikipedia
• Photosynthetically active radiation, encyclopaedic article. The 400 to 700 nm band plants use. Wikipedia
• UK climate averages, sunshine duration. Annual sunshine hours by region. Met Office
• BS EN 12464-1, Light and lighting, lighting of work places. Families of white light and colour rendering. BSI