A furniture designer from Derbyshire has taken a unique approach to making new pieces -- grow them straight out of the ground. Gavin Munro's designs use trees grown around plastic frames with the resulting chairs, tables and lamps made from a single piece of wood.
Furniture is grown from ash, sycamore, hazel, crabapple, sessile oak and royal oak and takes years to be ready for harvest. The first prototype chair, which was completed earlier this year, took five years to grow. A series of pendant lamps started in 2012 were also recently completed.
Munro's company, Full Grown, started planting trees to grow furniture in 2006. Around 3,000 trees have been planted on a 2.5 acre site with production getting underway in late 2011.
Trees are first planted and the shoots are then trained to grow around a frame shaped like the piece of furniture they will ultimately become. This could be a chair, a lamp, a table, a frame for a mirror or "anything you can imagine", according to the company's website. Once the object has formed it is left to thicken for a few years before being harvested and then seasoned until it dries.
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