Downside to redirecting index to subfolder

I have 3 main sections to my website and each are in their own subfolders. My main index page is for only one of the 3 sections but lives outside the subfolder in the root.

Will it damage SEO, the user experience or good practice by instead moving the index to the subfolder and using something like htaccess to redirect to it from a google search or direct link etc?

eg redirect 301 from mysite.com to mysite.com/subfolder1/

The reason is that for all the other pages, relative links are within the subfolder but the index needs to point to the subfolder so it means it's structured differently.