Indoor plant-growing systems used to mean boxy hydroponics for hobbyists, odiferous, organic set-ups for hippies and, of course, the pots of herbs cultivated by cannabis enthusiasts. But there is a new generation of designs for indoor gardeners who are equally interested in stylish living that should turn these stereotypes on their heads.
Blending aesthetic appeal, industrial technique and a constant concern for sustainability, along with a desire to reintroduce a kind of agriculture into everyday life, three new cutting-edge devices differ only in the basic human need each claims to meet.
Food is the focus of Irish duo Ian Walton and Eoin McNally’s Cultivate System, an indoor vegetable-growing apparatus created as part of the Kitchens of the Future project sponsored by the German domestic appliance manufacturer Miele. It borrows its “ebb and flow” hydroponics and technologically novel “grow LED” lighting from industrial agriculture but the designers’ main premise was that kitchens “need not be about more and more technology”, Walton says. “There are fridges with screens in them, fridges that tell you what food they contain but we wanted to look to the past to go forward.”
Inspiration came from the old, sustainable rural Irish way of life. “We looked at ovens incorporating turf walls, at the way, before refrigerators, people used to preserve foods with salt,” Walton recalls. “We even looked at the practice of keeping a chicken in the bottom of the dresser. These were days when people had to be self-sufficient.”
The Cultivate System not only enables you to grow your own food (providing, Walton says, two-thirds of your recommended daily vegetable intake) but also recycles kitchen greywater, uses compostable, corn-plastic plant pods and, with automated feeding and watering, is itself largely self-sustaining. Yet in spite of its down-to-earth ethos, the mechanism – which has not yet gone into production – would look rather out of place in a hovel. Walton and McNally might have softened Miele’s typically aseptic aesthetic with touches of wood and white ceramic but the design still looks like something a turtleneck-sporting Berliner would be proud to have in his kitchen. It would engender talk at a dinner party, rather than after it.
A hankering for clean urban air explains the advent of the Green Light, from the Experimental Design Lab at New York University. Drawing upon research into purifying the closed systems of space stations, Natalie Jeremijenko and her team enlisted the help of plant life in hoovering up the nasty chemicals, such as benzene and formaldehyde, that home and office furnishings wheeze out all day.
Such noxious substances sound thoroughly modern but, Jeremijenko explains, “trees themselves emit volatile organic compound, the most common urban poison. There are also lots of emissions from the soil – from healthy bacteria digesting in the mulch. As a consequence, low-dwelling forest floor plants have become highly adapted to removing many indoor air pollutants.”
The Green Light exploits these organisms in a design poised tantalisingly between air filter, terrarium and chandelier. The plants sit in the broad, circular rim of a glass bell, blown in a smelter fuelled by landfill methane, and suspended from – again – an energy-efficient, grow LED bulb. That primary light source is connected in turn to a solar awning that, “rather than being stuck on the roof, functions more like a blind, so you get a beautiful, dappled shadow”.
Although Jeremijenko emphasises that the Green Light is no passive purchase – that it is meant to engage users with the environmental message it embodies – it, too, needs little maintenance, being replenishable with water only once a week. It costs a significant $6,000 but, with its severe beauty and eerie glow, it caused quite a stir at the recent International Contemporary Furniture Fair in New York. A desklamp offshoot is planned.
Environmental preachiness sometimes makes me want to leap into a Ferrari and belch CO2 all the way to my third home in Monaco. So it was a relief to find that although Hans Andersson and Johan Svensson invest 10 per cent of profits from their company, Green Fortune, into renewable energy production, their cures for the “rootlessness and stress” of modern urban existence do not involve the donning of hair shirts.
The two Swedes formed their business on the basis that “all over the world people are moving to big cities and urbanised people of our generation don’t know as much about plant cultivation as previous generations, who were more likely to have worked the land”, Andersson explains. “We also noticed that, in Stockholm, there’s no longer space to build parks, so we wanted to build ‘parks’ indoors, where people spend their time. We think there’s something healthy and inspiring about plants and we wanted to make those benefits accessible to modern urban people.”
One of their two products, the Streamgarden, is a hydroponic cultivator similar in function and industrial genesis to the Cultivate System, except designed for decorative plants. Frugally dispensing its own food and water, it is geared to people with taxing schedules or who travel frequently yet still want a green greeting at home. The Plantwall, a kind of indoor version of the traditional ivy-clad frontage, is similarly self-sustaining. Irrigation tubes run through the textile layers holding in the soil and plants. The vegetation can be trimmed or let run wild, in the latter state exemplifying the merger of inside and outside that characterises each of these ingenious new designs.
