Carpets have become very popular. But cheap ones release tons of VOCs due to fire retardants and anti-stain treatments.
I've switched to a house built in the Scandinavian style, with oiled wooden floors and simple soap-treated furniture. Not only beautiful, but also lacks the typical brand new smell. Theoretically much better in terms of nasty VOCs.
Studies are lacking, so I prefer to err on the safe side. Especially since buying natural furniture that releases less VOCs is not limiting. In fact, it will last longer as materials are of higher quality.
IKEA has a whole range of raw solid pine furniture (without stain) that is incredibly cheap. E.g. an Ingo dining table costs ~$50. Last time I checked, it was manufactured in Poland, and it's pretty awesome quality for the price.
Recently, Waring and his colleagues reanalyzed all 195 studies that have examined whether houseplants can filter the air. They found that some types of plants can remove higher amounts of VOCs than others. But once you factor in the effects of working in a large room, none of the plants are able to do much.
Waring told me to imagine a small office, 10 feet by 10 feet by eight feet. “You would have to put 1,000 plants in that office to have the same air-cleaning capacity of just changing over the air once per hour, which is the typical air-exchange rate in an office ventilation system,” he said. That’s 10 plants per square foot of floor space. Even if you chose the most effective type of VOC-filtering plant, you would still need one plant per square foot, Waring said.