When asked about his highly unusual adventure in furniture design, Gavin Munro had the following to say: “It’s a bit like a vineyard. You’ve got a few years to get everything up and growing.. They don’t grow into chairs on their own. At the same time, you can’t force them to do anything they don’t want to do otherwise they die back”. If you wondered what really makes these trees find the correct final shape, then you must know that it takes a lot of nurturing, coppicing, grafting and pruning.
Through years of hard work Munro gets to “convince” trees to take unusual shapes by using blue corrugated plastic frames. It’s very hard as Munro details: “At any given point, there’s a branch that’s in the right moment to do something and you’ve got to find it… For every 100 pieces, there are 1,000 shoots and branches that you want, and 10,000 that you don’t. It’s not necessarily obvious which one is which.”. The first chairs will be harvested in 2016. Lampshades will start at £900, hexagon-shaped mirrors at £450 and chairs will go for £2,500.
