Michelle Bexelius is a wellness designer, environmental wellness practitioner, and founder of DesignWell Studios. For more than 15 years, she has helped clients understand the connection between their health and the places where they live, work, recover, and heal—then translate that understanding into environments that feel calmer, function better, and support everyday well-being.

Her work bridges environmental health, building science, interior design, and the human experience. Through environmental assessments, testing guidance, healthy material selection, biophilic design, and wellness-focused consulting, Michelle helps make complex building and exposure concerns easier to understand. She then turns those findings into clear, practical decisions that support comfort, restoration, and long-term resilience.

Michelle has inspected and tested hundreds of homes and has seen firsthand how the built environment can either support the people within it or quietly add stress through mold and moisture, VOCs and off-gassing materials, poor ventilation, EMFs, contaminated air or water, and other conditions that may go unnoticed until the body is already under strain. Her approach looks beyond a single test result or isolated concern. She considers how the property functions as a whole, how occupants experience the space, and how materials, systems, routines, and surrounding environmental conditions may interact over time.

Her understanding of the body–environment connection is both professional and personal. Michelle initially planned to become a physician, drawn to the complexity of human biology. During her first college cadaver lab, however, she experienced a severe reaction to formaldehyde. That exposure revealed a lifelong sensitivity and redirected her path toward understanding how the environments around us influence health.

Michelle went on to study art and visual communication in Europe before building a career in San Francisco as a usability engineer and experience designer. She led digital learning initiatives, conducted ethnographic research, and learned to observe real-life behavior, identify patterns, and translate complex systems into clear, human-centered solutions. Over time, her focus expanded from screens to spaces—and from digital interfaces to the air, light, materials, and sensory conditions people experience every day.

Motherhood deepened that shift. In 2000, while searching for safer products for her baby’s nursery and finding few meaningful options, Michelle launched Green This Life, an early eco-wellness platform created to help families make healthier choices. She later trained with the Institute for Building Biology and Ecology, completing certifications in healthy building practices, indoor air quality, EMFs, and environmental testing.

Her work became even more personal following her own experience with toxic mold exposure and complex health challenges. Wanting to understand recovery more fully, Michelle became a certified Integrative Health Practitioner and studied nervous system regulation and brain retraining. These experiences reinforced an essential principle in her work: when an environment feels safer and more supportive, the body has more opportunity to settle, restore, and build resilience.

Nature has always been central to Michelle’s life and work. Raised by a landscape architect mother and a builder and sculptor father, she grew up around gardens, job sites, natural materials, forests, and coastlines. That foundation continues to shape her approach today. Through biophilic design, she brings nature’s patterns and intelligence into the built environment using natural materials, supportive light, cleaner air and water, sensory balance, and meaningful connections to the outdoors.

Today, Michelle leads DesignWell Studios through three integrated areas of practice. Wellness Assessments help clients identify environmental conditions that may be affecting their health and comfort. Wellness Design transforms those insights into healthier, more restorative homes, clinics, workplaces, and gathering spaces. Wellness Strategy helps builders, manufacturers, practitioners, and wellness-focused companies translate technical expertise into clear messaging, educational resources, customer experiences, and market-facing solutions.

Across every service, Michelle is known for bringing calm to complexity. She meets clients where they are, helps identify what matters most, and creates a thoughtful sequence of next steps that respects their goals, capacity, lifestyle, and budget.

Her mission is simple: to help create places that feel as good as they look—and that support people in living, working, recovering, and thriving more fully.