In Derbyshire, England, there’s a two-acre field where furniture isn’t made; it’s harvested. No sawdust, no power tools, no assembly lines, just dirt, sun and a whole lot of patience.
Alice and Gavin Munro have spent the last 20 years honing the art of sculpting living trees to grow upside down into the shapes of complex, ready-made chairs. Their company, Full Grown, is now one of the most talked-about bio design projects in the world and their pieces now sell for up to £75,000 (around $90,000). As the Washington Post reported in an interview with the couple, the story behind these chairs is as extraordinary as the chairs themselves. Fittingly, none of their creations are in their own house; Gavin and Alice have cheerfully admitted their dog Doris would make very short, very expensive work of them.
An idea rooted in childhood
The Full Grown story didn’t start in a design studio. When Gavin was about seven, a moment quietly happened in his family garden that changed everything. His parents had bonsai trees, and one winter, looking up at them on a shelf, he noticed one that had grown a little too freely and bore an unmistakable resemblance to a throne. It was an image that stayed with him for 25 years.
That memory was deepened in a hard chapter to follow. Gavin was diagnosed with scoliosis and Klippel-Feil syndrome, a rare bone condition, and spent long spells in hospital during his childhood. One of the hospitals where he was a patient was built in the woods, and he could see the trees from his bed. Nature, which he could only observe from afar in those years, became a silent anchor. Later, when he studied furniture design, the whole picture fell into place. Why not grow the tree into the shape you want right from the start instead of growing a tree for decades, cutting it down, breaking it into pieces, and gluing it back into forms that will eventually fall apart?
“Instead of force-growing a tree for 50 years and then cutting it down and making it into smaller and smaller bits… the idea is to grow the tree into the shape that you want directly. It's a kind of zen 3D printing,” said Gavin.
