“We run an organised woodland that emits chairs.” - Gavin Munro
Do you like the look of furniture that uses organic curves and shapes? How about a chair that has been cultured by caring arboriculturalist into a shape you can sit down on in your lounge room? Gavin Munro is building a business on that idea, and it’s a growing one. By Jeremy Torr.
Derbyshire, England. April 2020. Gavin Munro was born with a spinal problem. He inherited a rare bone disease called Klippel-Feil syndrome, which meant that one of the vertebrae in his spine was malformed and didn’t work as it should. Because of that, when he was a young boy, he had to go into hospital for a series of operations. These meant he had to wear a halo frame to keep his head and neck rigid while the corrected bones re-fused. That gave him plenty of time to think, to look out the window of the ward towards the woods and forests that bordered on the hospital, and to wonder about a bonsai tree he had seen once, that looked like a chair.
The Gatti Chair. Courtesy Full Grown.
Today, Munro is the owner and lead inspiration that has brought all these things together: he grows chairs. “It’s the combination of kind, competent culture and making the least possible intervention with nature in order to get the things that we want,” he says. The things he wants are not just chairs: they are lamps, tables and more. Using ash, hazel, sycamore, beech and oak, he has planted over 500 saplings in his “tree factory” in two fields just outside Wirksworth, near Matlock in Derbyshire, England. And in nature’s own time they will become beautiful, integral, sturdy and completely whole pieces of furniture.
After studying Art at Leeds University, Munro served his time as a cabinetmaker and barn-builder, followed by a stint building eco-houses in California. Back in England, and feeding on those old hospital-driven observations and dreams, he founded Full Grown in 2006, specifically to grow furniture. His experience over the past 14 years has made him an expert in furniture growing, a field he accurately describes a “very niche.” But one which he believes is much more sympathetic to the environment than the usual method of forest farming, then timber production, then assembly.
“Usually, we take trees, we grow them for 50 years then cut them into smaller bits that we stick together in ways that can only ever come apart,” he explains. “The whole point of (Full Grown) is to actually make things that are grown into one solid piece, and to try to make the most subtle interventions into nature instead.”
The big bonus is that unlike conventional forestry harvesting – where the tree is cut completely down, killing it – his approach leaves the roots still healthy and viable, and any furniture that is grown from them is merely harvested. With new shoots and branches rapidly sprouting to help create yet more furniture. Munro’s tree factory will produce furniture the way an orchard produces plums or apples.
“We started this idea in a plant pot in my mum’s garden,” he says, “so it’s taken a while, because we were five years in before we really started knowing what we had.” He says that first five years showed how simple the process was – but the next five years revealed how complex it was to put into practice as a business. As he puts it on his website, his team is “developing an elegant, simple art form that emits oxygen, absorbs CO2 and whose byproducts sustain the birds, the bees and other wildlife. Each piece is an expression of patience and collaboration with nature – a mutual experience.”
Munro says the furniture growing – as opposed to designing, cutting and joining – proposition starts by aiming to produce pleasing, unique and eminently touchable products with a similar appeal to vintage wines and whiskies; products that are crafted by hand over years of growth and end with the potential for change in the way we think about the objects with which we surround ourselves.
Back in the field, the lines of upside-down chairs are sprouting contentedly, helped on their way with some judicious pruning, grafting and training. Munro says it’s not a case of forming, or forcing the trees into shape. It’s about being there when the time is right to make incredibly subtle changes to the shoots. “It’s the tree that takes the lead,” he smiles. “It’s a kind of Zen 3D printing.”
The trees are trained, then harvested, then grow again. Courtesy Full Grown.
Munro says the way the trees are growing, and the learning process involved, has given them much more insight into the whole process and what is needed. “We’ve started to move away from the original idea of an outdoor (furniture) factory towards the idea that we have an organised woodland that emits chairs.”
And the beauty of what he is doing, adds Munro, is that the whole process is organic. “All we ask of the tree is that it grows along certain pathways.”