Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/09/25/uk-couple-grows-their-own-furn.html
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It’s a very cool concept. Just make sure to sit down before the end of the video when they flash on screen the price of one chair.
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Yeah, i went to their shop and when i saw the price (spoiler alert it is $12,000 for a single chair)… yowza. For years I’d do something like this with our wisteria plants. I made crazy stuff with it: a giant bird’s nest, swords, shields. Thought about making a hanging chair/weaver type ‘nest’ either kid or human size, but our awnings aren’t specced to hold me.
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So they want a much slower, uglier, inefficient, and more expensive way to do what wicker furniture can do?
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Or nice fast-growing bamboo…
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Anybody want to buy some magic beans?
Furniture seeds.
Get in touch, I have hundreds.
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“I have never sat in a chair that feels so alive!” says the woman who is sitting on something dead.
The site mentions that they use willow (they also claim environmental benefits, lol, like they’d let bugs crawl on a 12,000-smacker chair), but though the different willow species are considered hardwood, they’re not, really, as you can see by the Manufacturing list here:
Is this Alice Munro the author? I thought the name looked familiar.
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lol. Right.
Instead of growing a tree for decades, in a dense forest, harvesting it to make dozens of pieces of furniture from it, just grow them on an airy field.
And if it breaks - no, make that when it breaks - throw it away, because it will be nearly unrepairable. While my cheap pine bench outside our house withstands the German climate for over 15, simply because I clean and oil it every couple of years and tighten some screws. Even though it regularly supports climbing children or plus 100 kg adults.
Though I guess the business is sustainable, as their isn’t an actual shortage of neither folds nor money.
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The marketing is a bit nonsensical, but that’s marketing for you. However I do like the grown chairs, and I don’t think they’re ugly. If they can get people to buy them for so much money, good for them.
I don’t understand the hostility, really. Though the ecological benefits are a bit overblown, it’s not as if growing trees is bad for the environment. Especially willows are extremely easy to grow, and you don’t really need pesticides. Just a bit of marshland will do.
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It’s the claim that it’s more ecological to grow them this way than to wait 50 years and harvest trees that irks me. It’s a blatant misinformation on trump levels.
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It’s marketing.
The main problem with Trump is that he forgets that being the president is not a business, so you should quit the marketing speak.
Also, I do think their chairs are probably more ecological than most stuff you buy at IKEA and the like. Though probably not for the reasons they claim.
I doubt it. Alice Munro is Canadian and lives in southwestern Ontario.
Great that they grow theses things in concert with nature, but then they murder them and sell the bodies.
they probably got hint at three dimensional printing methods and said heay
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