Growing chairs? British designer grows trees into furniture!

Designer Gavin Munro of Full Grown Ltd has taken a complete rethink of how wood is used as a material. His production method upends traditional furniture manufacturing processes that involve cutting down trees, trucking logs, sawing the wood, then gluing them back together, generating a lot of industrial and ecological waste in the process.

In 4 years, Munro and his team have been nurturing hundreds of willow trees, patiently waiting for the right harvest time.

A customer may need to wait longer for a custom chair in our age of instant 3D-printed objects but Munro offers a model of mass manufacturing meets delayed gratification. The reward is a unique and lasting object, sturdier than most manufactured furniture because it has no seams.