Full Grown: Trees Grown into Furniture and Art Objects

The most common way of producing wooden furniture is fairly straightforward: grow the proper trees for a few decades, chop em down, cut them into smaller pieces and assemble the pieces into a chair. Derbyshirebased furniture designer Gavin Munro wondered if he could try a wholly different approach: what if he could just grow chairs What if trees could be forced to grow in chairlike shapes and through strategic sculpting and grafting result in an annual chair harvest. After a lengthy yearslong trial in his mothers garden and a sturdy proofofconcept, Full Grown was born. Munro points out that the idea of growing furniture actually dates back millennia. The Chinese were known to dig holes to fill with chairshaped rocks and had tree roots grow through the gaps, while the Egyptians and Greeks had a method for growing small stools. But Full Grown appears to be on a scale entirely of its own, with an entire farm destined to be harvested into chairs, assorted light fixtures, and other unusual objects. He