A new mini-trend of landscape as furniture seems to have popped up amongst
the designer set. Couches made of sod and chairs made of evergreen boughs
are sprouting up all over. The idea broke big last year with a cover article
on how to grow your own grass (couch) in in the hipster DIY bible, ReadyMade
Magazine . Now the
cool kids at ApartmentTherapy have spotted "Branch Benches" at the
Met, and it turns
out that designer Greg Tate, who wrote the article for ReadyMade, expanded
the idea into a full-scale lawn lounge at the CaBoom festival in Santa
Monica.
As quirky and fun as these ideas are, they aren’t exactly innovative. Guys
like Arborsmith Studios have been growing trees
into chairs, couches, etc. for years. And if you check out the history
section of their website, you’ll see that Arborsculpture has been around for
centuries.
The obvious question to me is: why? There’s an article on www.noritage.com
about a guy who grew a chair from seed. It took 11 years. I really wanted to
get behind this idea. I did. But it just seems kind of…well…pointless.
You could have bought a chair and enjoyed your garden for 11 years. And
these sod couches–has anyone thought about grass stains? Bugs? Look, guys,
I’m all for fun design and sustainable materials. But so far, the inside of
the tree seems like the best part for furniture. I don’t have to fertilize,
mow, trim, or train my Pottery Barn specials. I can sit on them. And that’s
enough for me.
Written and contributed by Andrea Sharfin
<img via MobTown>
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I want to provide some context on that specific piece. It was originally designed in 1995 for a furniture competition that posed the question (paraphrasing here), “What would our personal environment look like for a society that embraced sustainability as a way of life?” Our response was outdoor furniture sculpted from your own lawn. Our intro started with the question, “How much oxygen has your furniture produced today?”. We were being light hearted about it and built one for our yard around an existing fire pit – we even made a Sand Bag chair designed to compliment the Sod Sofa. Link here http://www.gregtatedesign.com/popups/ss.html
Now fast forward a few years later and ReadyMade was reviewing a portfolio of the work and came across Sod Sofa. They thought it’d be perfect for a spring DIY project. It also had the distinction of making the cover and has taken on a life of it’s own and is much bigger than me.
All that said, I’d like to address a few of your points – Pardon the reference, but Aborsmiths are a branch off the same tree if you will, I didn’t see any sod furniture on their site. By the way, it takes literally two days (if planned out well) to build a Sod Sofa and it’s green immediately, you don’t have to wait years for it to grow. Another issue is grass stains. Have you ever sat on the grass at the park? Maybe you’ve experienced grass stains and had to deal with bugs – but that’s the price you pay for going outside. Seriously though, this is just like sitting at the park except it’s a sofa in the park. And finally, the “Pottery Barn specials” aren’t about fun design as much as they are about satisfying the most amount of people with the least amount of effort. Defaulting to Pottery Barn I hope will not become the trend.
May 25th, 2005 at 2:12 pm
The idea of Arborsculpture (tree trunks grown into items) is that a farmer could go into growing chairs and sell his new crop to pottery barn replacing the furniture factory for a sort of “furniture orchard” and leave the big old trees where they stand.
Trees trunks can assume the shape of almost anything. Aside from furniture we have other things growing like a boat, bridge, spiral staircase and several gazebos that are helping us to learn how to grow a house.
As to the time element argument, a chair can be grown in 3-5 years or less. I think it’s like anything else, a business can get ahead of the curve by planting every year after 4 or five years they have an annual harvest.
Homeowners that grow there own would tend to be attached to there own work and use it for a very long time, unlike the junk that comes from Pottery Barn. Any one with a yard can shape trees. The trees can live a normal lives, proving all the benefits that trees offer the world, while performing as garden furniture, fencing, railings, faucet holder, gate post and gazebo.
Richard Reames
http://www.arborsmith.com
July 18th, 2005 at 6:28 pm