Gavin Munro grows chairs for Full Grown (SWNS)
A British couple has spent 20 years perfecting the practice of sculpting trees to grow into the shapes of ready-made seats designed with living branches.
Alice and Gavin Munro began creating the ‘furniture orchard’ on a two-acre English farm in 2006, but the harvesting typically takes between 6-9 years per chair.
The process involves pruning young tree branches as they grow over a special metal frame to form the shape.
Each item is dried for a year after being chopped, and are then sold to customers as artworks valued at tens of thousands of dollars.
The couple now wants to launch a program to help others grow their own. Not just chairs and benches, but lamps and tables, too.
“Since we started we’ve used all sorts of different types of trees,” said Gavin, who calls his business called Full Grown.
“Primarily we’ve shown pieces from willow, but we’ve tried apple, cherry, oak, ash, beech and hawthorn.”
Chair grown on a tree by Gavin Munro / Full Grown (SWNS)
His first experiments were growing the chairs upright, but they soon realized it would work better if they grew upside down. They’ve also moved on from the plastic mold around which the branches would grow. Now they use metal. (Watch the video below…)
Gavin came up with the ground-breaking idea while he was hospitalized as a child with a rare congenital condition that causes an abnormal fusion of two or more neck vertebrae. During months when he underwent several operations to straighten his spine, he had the idea while viewing the scenery from his hospital bed.
Gavin went on to study art and furniture design, before setting up his furniture business in 2006.
Gavin Munro creation by Full Grown (SWNS photo)
“This has all been my husband’s idea,” Alice told SWNS news. “He got the time to observe the woodland over many months and observe the creatures. His parents also had some overgrown bonsai and the silhouette looked like a throne.
“Then he was in California collecting driftwood on the beach—and he saw some sticks laid out together in what looked like a table. He thought, ‘how hard would it be to grow into that shape’.”
Gavin wanted to create useful, beautiful objects, and collaborate with nature, so he started to grow some chairs in a corner of a friend’s farm in 2006—and they still rent the orchard from them in Derbyshire, to this day.
“You’re basically taking a piece of bark from one branch and bringing them together, so they grow together.
“It’s absolutely bizarre to do. It’s like bonsai meets 3D printing.
“We use a frame, it’s sort of a long oblong nearly so it can stick and shape properly. When it’s been coppiced with the water shoots coming out there are specific times of the growth where it’s easier to bend.
“You’re effectively tying the branch to the frame with these garden ties.”
Upside down chair growing from tree by Gavin Munro / Full Grown (SWNS)
“We’ve tried growing a few different items of furniture, but we’re focusing on chairs—and a bench design which seems considerably easier.
“We experiment to help figure out how each species reacts to what we want to do.
“It might take another two decades to work out how to best share this knowledge.
The couple are now also setting up the Full Grown Academy to pass down the skills in the hope that more people will carry on the process.
They are selling the chairs as artworks which are “priced accordingly” and gallery owner Sarah Myerscough says they can be worth around £75,000 (nearly $100,000).
Alice and Gavin Munro began creating the ‘furniture orchard’ – SWNS
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A bronze cast of one of their chairs appeared at this month’s Chelsea Flower Show in the UK, while several other chairs have been displayed in galleries worldwide.
“We’re quite lucky that the prototypes and failures are being seen as art,” Gavin mused.
“They cost too much at the moment to mass produce. Out of the few hundred we started, we’re going to be lucky to have a dozen new chairs over the 20 years of labor.”
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“Growing your own in your garden is the most accessible way of doing it at the moment—and lots of people have been wanting to do this in their own gardens, so that’s our next level.
“We’ve got six chairs out there in the world that are sittable, and there’s a handful more still growing and drying in the workshop.”
Their aim is to have an orchard like this in every town, but that may be a dream needing many more green thumbs.
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