Is living furniture the next frontier in ultra-eco-friendly design? Oxygenating the air, providing a punch of green and acting as a natural accent in both interior and exterior spaces, these 13 unusual furniture designs incorporate actively growing moss, grass, vines, mushrooms and even crystals.
Growing Chair by Michel Bussien
(image via: yanko design)
Raised on a growing platform like an elvish throne, Michel Bussien’s ‘Growing Chair’ helps us get back to our roots with a clear polycarbonate frame that is filled with greenery as the plant inside grows. The artist says “To move further we need to incorporate the living matter that surrounds us. Let us use the complexity of living nature and include it in our creations. These creations will then redefine the way we reconstruct nature.”
Moss Bath Mat
(image via: dornob)
All that water that drips off your body when you emerge from the shower could be feeding live moss, which is just squishy enough to provide a super-comfy surface to stand on. This unusual bath mat features three different types of moss that thrives in the moist environment of a bathroom.
Pooktre Chair by Peter Cook
(images via: inhabitat)
Free of waste and man-made materials, the ‘Pooktre Chair’ by Peter Cook is an entirely natural piece of actively growing furniture that is lovingly shaped over seven to eight years before being replanted in the yard of the purchaser. Each chair is a work of living, functioning sculpture.
Grow Your Own Crystal Chair
(image via: mocoloco)
It may not be the most comfortable chair ever, but it’s certainly unique. Japanese designer Tokujin Yoshioka starts with a polyester elastomer skeleton, seeds it with living crystals and submerges it in an aquarium to provide the perfect growing environment and a month later, this sparkling piece of artistic ‘furniture’ is what results.
The artist said “…I have pondered on challenging the history of design by creating an epoch-making chair grown from natural crystal structures. Today, a rapid development of technology, particularly the use of computer renderings, has ensured and made various things real. I want to believe, however, there is something in nature that defies all human imagination.”
Mushrooms Ate My Furniture
(image via: inhabitat)
Pretty greenery and crystals aren’t the only natural materials that can be made to grow on furniture. Perhaps one of the last living materials you’d expect turns up on Shinwei Rhoda Yen’s ‘mushrooms ate my furniture’ chair, a simple modern wooden bench that provides a habitat for fungus. The chair naturally biodegrades after a few years exposed to the elements, giving itself over to the life that it sustains.
DIY Grass Armchair
(images via: green upgrader)
The ‘Terra Grass Chair’, pictured above, is a simple cardboard frame that you assemble, cover with dirt and plant with grass seeds. Water it regularly et voila, you end up with your very own DIY grass furniture. You could create your own version with an old, less-than-pretty chair using the same process for an even more eco-friendly option.
Airplant Table
(image via: ecofriend)
While most indoor living furniture requires a bit of maintenance, not to mention the occasional mess of dirt and water, the ‘Oxygen of Green’ low table is worry-free but still green and alive. The table features a bed of tillandsia air plants, which live off the moisture and nutrients in the air while also enriching your home with oxygen.
Kinokoto Planter Table
(image via: mocoloco)
How about furniture that incorporates plants in a subtle way, as accents? Kinokoto’s table includes a narrow planting strip that provides a little bit of greenery while leaving most of the tabletop surface functional.
Vege-Table by Judy Hoysak
(image via: re-nest)
While grow lights are a great way to maintain an indoor garden, it can be hard to make them fit into the décor of a home. Judy Hoysak turns a mini garden into a piece of functioning furniture with the ‘Vege Table’, a coffee table/self-watering planter equipped with lights that can grow lettuce right in your living room with minimal effort.
Mobilier a Jardiner
(image via: mocoloco)
For outdoor areas that are low on both space and greenery, such as balconies or rooftop gardens, perhaps combining furniture and plants is the way to go. That’s the approach taken by 5.5 Designers with ‘Mobilier a jardiner’, an outdoor furniture collection that incorporates planters into the backs of chairs and benches. Just don’t plant anything thorny!
Kai Linke’s Plant Art Furniture
(images via: dornob)
It’s messy, and not always pretty, but Kai Linke’s plant-centered design is more experiment than functional furniture. Link plants quick-growing grasses, bulbs and bamboo in clear frames that skew and force the plants’ growth patterns, sometimes resulting in overflowing roots, grass growing sideways and other unusual configurations.
Modern Plant Chair by Zhuo Wang
(image via: double takes)
This might just be an ordinary albeit sleek and modern chair if not for the addition of a single pot on one of the back legs, allowing for a touch of greenery or, if one desires, a vine that travels up the leg of the chair and entwines itself around the frame.
Auto-Cannabalistic Table
(image via: inhabitat)
This table isn’t going to last very long – and that’s exactly the point. While most eco-friendly furniture is designed with a long life in mind, the Auto-Cannabalistic Table will inevitably consume itself as the recycled paper egg cartons it’s made from decompose under the weight of soil and water.



