Botanical manufacturing

Growing solid wooden furniture without the joins

This is intruiging. Gavin Munro of Derbyshire-based Full Grown explains how moulding trees into one-piece chairs, lamps or mirror frames is far more eco-friendly than felling. This is no ordinary furniture showroom. In a field on the side of a hill 15 miles north of Derby lie row after row of perfectly maintained willow, oak, ash and sycamore trees. What clearly mark this field out from a regular forest are the blue-and-black plastic moulds that are training the trees in pre-defined routes, where they are gently and expertly manipulated into the exact shape of a chair, a table, a lamp or a mirror frame. read more

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