Plant furniture
First focus on interesting concepts combining nature and furniture.
Profession: Furniture…. farmer.
Designer Gavin Munro has found the solution to no longer cut trees to make his furniture. He grows them in his field in England!
His project entitled “Full Growth” launched in 2006 is a definite success.
After a first harvest of chairs and lamps in 2012, its fame has continued to grow.
Its order and pre-order book has been full for years.
Each piece of furniture is unique and requires years of growth. If you wanted to acquire one of its models, you would have to arm yourself with a lot of patience and plan a significant budget. It takes between 4 and 11 years to create a piece of furniture and the price of a chair is around 3,500 euros.
His idea is to influence the direction of the growth with a sophisticated system of stakes.
Added to a skilful cutting of wood, we can thus give the branches the desired shape.
He is not, however, the first to have tried the experiment.
Traces of this practice have been found in different forms, at different times, in the four corners of the planet.
The Egyptians, Indians and Chinese knew how to influence nature to create furniture or building elements.
Closer to us chronologically, in the early 1900s, the American John Krubsack had already succeeded in growing an armchair.
Today, among the followers of these techniques, we can quote Christopher Cattle, Richard Reames or even Peter Cook and Becky Northey with their Pooktreproject.
The wood most used by Gavin Munro’s team is willow. He also uses other wood species such as oak, ash, plane tree …
For now, production is focused on chairs, but the designer and his co-director Alice are planning in the future to grow sculptures, stools, tables …