Tag Archives: cork

Cork in Interior Design: Combining Sustainability with Style

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Sourced sustainably from cork oak trees, cork is a renewable material favored in architecture and interior design for its porous texture, softness, and lightweight nature. Its versatility extends to various applications like flooring, walls, furniture, and home accessories, complementing materials such as metal, wood, and marble, and it adds a distinctive touch to any design. The design industry is progressively acknowledging cork’s value, especially considering its eco-friendly extraction method that allows tree barks to naturally regenerate. Also, cork’s ability to reduce plastic usage while offering limitless creative possibilities has firmly established its role in the design field

Designer: MB Cork

What are the advantages of using Cork?

• Renewable

Cork products have a minimal environmental impact, harvested without felling trees. With no waste in manufacturing and recyclability, cork is highly sustainable. Re-harvesting every 14 years makes it rapidly renewable. Demand drives the cultivation of more cork oak trees, promoting a healthier environment.

• Anti-microbial

Cork products promote good health as it is naturally antimicrobial. Cork resists mold, mildew, and pests while its antistatic surface reduces dust absorption. Low in volatile organic compounds, cork improves indoor air quality.

• Sustainable

Cork, a natural material, is fully biodegradable and recyclable, offering endless possibilities for reuse.

• Durable

Cork is commonly used in household items like flooring and bath mats due to its exceptional durability. With resistance to cracking, abrasions, and moisture, cork products can last up to 30 years or more with proper care. Cork maintains its pristine condition under furniture weight, making it a highly long-lasting material.

• Water Resistant

Cork’s high resistance to moisture, oxidation, and decay, due to its suberin and ceroid content, renders it impermeable to liquids and gases. This durability ensures that cork ages gracefully without deteriorating, making it an ideal option for environments with high humidity levels, like bathrooms, kitchens, or tropical climates.

Image courtesy of: FabrikaPhoto

• Provides Thermal and Acoustic Insulation

Cork doesn’t let heat, sound, or vibrations pass through easily because it traps gases in tiny compartments that are sealed off from each other. Wall cork panels offer these benefits and are available in interesting geometric patterns that make rooms look unique.

• Ensures Comfort

Cork offers remarkable comfort due to its cellular structure featuring microscopic gas pads, providing excellent shock absorption. Its soft texture, along with a temperature akin to that of the human body makes it a very cozy material. Note that chairs with cork seats are designed to provide warmth and softness, ensuring seating comfort.

What are the disadvantages of using Cork?

Cork is a comfortable and eco-friendly material as hand-harvesting contributes to its cost. Additionally, cork offers a limited color range, primarily in shades of beige and brown. However, it’s important to note that cork surfaces can be susceptible to damage from pets’ nails, and prolonged exposure to sunlight may cause fading over time, as with many natural materials.

How to incorporate cork into Interior Design?

The different applications of cork include:

1. Furniture

Designers: Erika Avery, Stu Cole

Seating is crucial in daily life, often seen in various forms in public spaces. However, predicting seating needs can be challenging. This stool concept offers a sustainable solution by transforming two stools into a bench and back, as required. The design centers on a sturdy cork column, offering stability and sustainability. The removable seat, with a center hole, can vary in shape and material. This adaptable design minimizes waste and meets changing needs effectively.

Designer: ( ae ) offices

The DOL furniture collection draws inspiration from the rugged volcanic rocks of Jeju Island in South Korea. Crafted from the outer bark of cork oak trees, each piece replicates the raw, uneven appearance of these natural formations. Handcrafted with care, the collection offers a unique blend of comfort, stability, and charm. Despite its unconventional material choice, cork provides lightweight, impact-absorbing, and insulating properties. Wooden profiles enhance structural support, while layers of wood oil and waxes add texture and character. Sustainable and visually captivating, DOL furniture embodies the beauty and resilience found in nature’s aftermath, making it a distinctive addition to any space.

Designer: Noé Duchaufour-Lawrance

The Burnt Cork furniture collection celebrates the resilience of Portuguese cork, with minimalist chairs, tables, and a stool crafted from blocks of blackened cork. Inspired by the forest fires of 2017 in Portugal, these pieces blend functionality with sculptural beauty, making them ideal for display in any living or dining space. With a gradual transition from rigid bases to curved forms, the chairs offer both comfort and aesthetic appeal. The eclectic shape of the stool adds an artistic flair to any room, making the Burnt Cork collection a testament to the enduring beauty and strength of cork as a furniture material.

2. Lighting

Designer: Oorjaa

Taking cues from modern design, this LED hanging pivot lamp, meticulously crafted from lightweight cork and accented with teak wood and brass fittings, creates the perfect ambiance for both work and leisure in corporate offices and residential spaces.

Transforming a traditionally industrial material, this LED hanging fragment box lamp, skillfully crafted from laser-cut lightweight cork, offers gentle illumination ideal for residential and hospitality environments.

3. Acoustic Panels

Designer: ClearSound Acoustics

Corkbee Concave presents acoustic wall panels that allow for unique wall designs. These panels effectively absorb sound and regulate environmental conditions. Made from recycled materials and recyclable themselves, they are sustainable and provide a natural and eco-friendly solution to improve sound quality in any space.

4. Flooring

Image courtesy of: oleksandrsh

Cork flooring is increasingly popular due to its numerous benefits. It offers shock absorption and comfort, lasting up to 40 years with proper maintenance. Additionally, Cork floors resist mold, mildew, termites, and dust, making them hypoallergenic. Their natural variations in tone and texture provide unique aesthetics. Cork floors can be dyed or stained, hold warmth, muffle sound, and are fire-resistant.

5. Home Goods

Designer: Mind the Cork

Mind the Cork offers a stylish collection of home goods crafted from sustainable cork. From hanging planters to cylindrical storage vessels, each piece is designed with eco-consciousness in mind. Founder Jenny Espirito Santo’s passion project has evolved into a line of practical yet minimalist products, including planters, dishware, and storage containers. Sourced from cork oak trees, this biodegradable material undergoes a regenerative harvesting process every decade, ensuring its sustainability. Collaborating with artisans in the UK and Portugal, Mind the Cork delivers functional and environmentally friendly items for modern homes.

6. Cladding

Designer: Atelier SAD and Iveta Zachariášová

This family home in the Czech countryside, designed by Atelier SAD and interior designer Iveta Zachariášová, is clad in cork for its weather-resistant and thermal properties. Situated near Rašovka at the foot of the Ještěd Ridge, the residence integrates seamlessly into the landscape of the Bohemian Paradise Protected Landscape Area. With its sleek design, gabled aluminum roof, and innovative use of Portuguese expanded cork, this home embodies modernity and sustainability. This stunning residence showcases the beauty and functionality of cork as a building material, creating a harmonious blend of architecture and nature.

7. Product Design

Designers: Assorted

Cork, a preferred material in product design, is prominently featured in the INNGAGE woodstove. Its main body, made of steel, incorporates cork profiles fixed at a distance from the structure to prevent darkening over time. Additionally, the cork acts as a safety layer, allowing users to touch and feel the stove securely.’

In conclusion, cork stands out as a remarkable material celebrated for its biodegradability, sustainability, and versatility. As we explore cork’s potential further, it embodies a dedication to environmentally friendly design and conscious consumption.

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Modular cork stool concept offers sustainable seating by turning into a bench

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Sitting is an important part of our daily lives, so it’s not unusual to see different kinds of seating furniture around places where people stay or pass through. Unfortunately, it’s hard to predict when you’d need a single chair or a multi-person bench, so spaces tend to either put multiple chairs together or have a few benches and force people to sit together. That strategy does work, at least until the situation changes and you need to change seats, which often means buying new seats and discarding the old ones. This minimalist stool concept tries to offer a more sustainable solution that helps reduce waste by turning two stools into a single bench and back again, depending on the need.

Designers: Erika Avery, Stu Cole

The requirements for a stool, chair, or bench are pretty simple. At the very least, it needs to be stable enough to support the weight of a human person sitting on it without toppling over or collapsing. Comfort is, of course, ideal, but some designs seem to forego that in exchange for other capabilities. It’s arguable that the “unknown” stool concept is one of these designs, though its modular nature leaves that open to interpretation and implementation.

The core element of this concept is the sturdy column made of cork, a sustainable and easily acquired material. It’s a single cylinder that makes up the center of the stool, but its secret lies in a smaller circle that connects to a removable seat with a hole in its center. It’s a simple system that requires no screws, extra parts, or complex mechanisms, which means maintenance, repair, and replacement will be just as simple as well.

That seat can, in theory, be anything, though the simple shapes of a square and a circle immediately come to mind. However, that doesn’t limit it to a single symmetrical shape either, since you can have a long rectangular seat with holes on each end, forming a bench when set on top of two cork columns. In fact, the design of the actual furniture is determined by the shape of that removable seat, and it can be as simple or as complex as needed.

The concept doesn’t exactly define what the seat has to be made of, so it can use wood, metal, plastic, or any other material. It can be bare or it can have some cushioning or upholstery to add a bit of comfort. More importantly, the seats can be changed, repaired, or replaced without throwing away the cork core, or vice versa. It’s a simple yet effective design that limits the waste of fixed chairs and stools while leaving the door open for combinations that deliver what’s needed at any given time.

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Hand-carved cork furniture collection evokes the raw beauty of black volcanic stone

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More often than not, furniture design is meant to feelings of warmth, comfort, or even joy, emotions that you’d want to experience inside a home, office, or even waiting area. After all, you will be using these pieces of furniture, including sitting on some of them, so it’s only natural to expect them to be more welcoming, at least visually. There are some more artistic designs that have provoking aesthetics, meant more to be seen rather than used. This furniture collection stands somewhere in the middle, projecting an image of dark and unpolished volcanic rocks that turn out to be comfortable, stable, and even charming in its own rough way.

Designer: ( ae ) offices

A volcano is full of ironies. It is both magnificent and terrifying, and its eruptions are equally destructive and mesmerizing. While the ash, lava, and rocks that volcanoes throw out inflict damage, they can also be used as materials to build and create things that have their own unique beauty despite their horrifying source. That’s the kind of juxtaposition that the DOL furniture delivers, providing a unique visual and tactile experience for every chair or table.

DOL takes its inspiration from the black volcanic stones found on Jeju Island in South Korea. These stones are being used as the foundations for different structures on the volcanic island, reusing what Mother Nature has thrown at them to build stronger architecture. The stones themselves have a raw and uneven appearance born of natural elements that give each piece a unique character. That’s the imagery that’s replicated in this low chair and low table, but using a material that’s the complete opposite of hardened volcanic rock.

The furniture uses the outer bark of the cork oak tree, a material that’s best known for being lightweight, impact-absorbing, and insulating. Each “stone” in this composition is crafted by hand, resulting in an equally unique look for each piece. Of course, cork isn’t the most rigid material for furniture, so it’s supplemented by wooden profiles that give it more structure. Layers of wood oil and waxes add the finishing touch that gives the cork a texture and character that will confuse the mind because of its dark roughness yet soft mass.

The use of cork also adds an element of sustainability, as cork bark undergoes a renewal process every nine years and is completely recyclable. It’s a fitting tribute to a stone that starts its life from the destructive explosion of a volcano before finding its way into people’s homes, buildings, and lives before returning to the earth once again to repeat the cycle.

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WiFi router concept uses cork as material and design aesthetic

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A wifi router is one of those devices that every house needs but we don’t really think about how it’s designed, what materials are used to make it, and other factors that come into it. As long as it does what it’s supposed to do, which is get you connected to the internet, then we’re almost always fine with it. However, most routers have a lifespan of 2-3 years and so it contributes to the million tons of e-waste that is generated annually by people who constantly change their gadgets and devices.

Designer: Connor Rusnak

A concept for a sustainable wifi router tries to solve that issue and at the same time give us a well-designed one that you will proudly display in your home office. The Pella uses cork in the design so you get an eco-friendly material that can also look good on your device. In theory, using this material should not interfere with the functionality of the device which is of course important since the only reason you’ll get a router is to be able to connect all your devices to the WiFi.

The cork is not just a building material but an integral part of the design. The router looks more like a smart speaker with its spherical shape which is also reminds me of a top but with a stable base. The basic controls, which are mainly the on/off button and what seems to be a reset button, are located on the base. There’s no need for any other controls or buttons so you get a pretty minimalist design, as all routers should probably have.

More often than not, these routers are hidden away in our home not just because it needs to be near a wall socket but because there isn’t any decorative aspect to it. But something like the Pella, which was designed with the brand Logitech in mind, can be something you put on your desk especially if you have an earthy or cork-like aesthetic.

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