Tag Archives: Garden

This indoor vertical garden is a bio-filter with smart technology designed to improve indoor air quality!

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Elpo is a biofilter that doubles as an indoor garden with integrated smart technology that improves indoor air quality and ensures healthy moisture levels.

Following the stay-at-home orders brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, new habits are hard to hit. Since then, we’ve been spending a lot of time indoors, renovating home offices, and bringing the gym to the family room. Getting back into the office, we’re all hyper-aware of the air we breathe and inevitably share with one another.

Inspired to provide an air filter for collaborative spaces, designers Kārlis Vītols, Lolita Epnere, Buka Bērziņa ushered Elpo into the office, a smart biofilter that doubles as a teeming, indoor garden.

Recognized by the European Product Design Awards, Elpo was a Top Design Winner in Flora and Fauna/Hydroponic Devices, nodding to its aesthetic and innovative design. Elpo aims to improve indoor air quality by combining technology and the power of nature.

By absorbing airborne toxins and gases into their leaves and sending them down to their roots, some plants are able to help purify the air we breathe. Equipped with a smart biofilter, it’s not only the plants that Elpo uses to improve indoor air quality.

Like many modern indoor gardens, Elpo comes stocked with automated, smart technology that lights, fans, and irrigates the potted greenery. In creating a smart biofilter that doubles as an indoor garden, Elpo improves indoor air quality while also functioning as a room divider in office settings.

The biofilter ensures healthy moisture levels, while the indoor garden boasts a stylish interior design element that opens up any room. Modular by design, buyers can even create a smart biofilter system that spans the entire width of any given room.

Designers: Kārlis Vītols, Lolita Epnere, and Buka Bērziņa

With an inconspicuous base design, the indoor garden takes the full spotlight.

Elpo looks right at home in any commercial or corporate setting.

The teeming garden feature works to brighten up every office space.

Elpo offers a cozy appeal to collaborative spaces and ensures clean air in the meantime.

The post This indoor vertical garden is a bio-filter with smart technology designed to improve indoor air quality! first appeared on Yanko Design.

Polar Bear Bench: A Touch of the North Pole at Home

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Do you know what my garden has been missing? More gnomes. A person can never have too many garden gnomes, despite what my wife says, and she says the 20+ I already have are enough. Enough! There’s no such thing. But now all those gnomes are going to be running for their lives after I install this Polar Bear Bench created by Design Toscano and available on Amazon (affiliate link). Santa’s helper not included.

The Arctic Polar Bear is made from crushed stone bonded with resin and reinforced with fiberglass, with a realistic white finish. The bench measures 79″W x 36″D x 38″H, and weighs in at about 110 lbs. For reference, a full-grown male polar bear can weigh between 770 and 1,540 lbs, and I plan on being about the same after Thanksgiving dinner. Pass the pecan pie!

Now I just need to add some fake blood and a fallen reindeer and I’ve got the perfect addition to my outdoor Christmas display! Will it win first place in my neighborhood’s annual decorating contest? Probably not. But will it receive the most complaints? Most definitely. And that’s a better prize than any snow globe trophy could ever be.

[via DudeIWantThat]

Plant-friendly products designed to fulfill your indoor gardening aspirations + cultivate a sustainable lifestyle!

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Gardening is an extremely therapeutic activity, and though I may not engage in it all the time, the few times that I have, I found it really delightful and soothing. Growing, tending to, and being surrounded by plants is intensely satisfying. All your worries slowly fade away, and you are simply enthralled by nature. And indoor gardening has become one of the major trends these days! Plants can truly transform a living space with their gentle presence. They add a touch of green and nature and create a serene and zen atmosphere. But tending to them is not the easiest task always! You need to pay special attention to your beloved plants and give them the best care to ensure that they grow well. And, we’ve curated a whole collection of product designs to help you with that! From a wearable that lets your plants communicate with you to an indoor vertical farm that uses LED lights and plant pods – these products are all you need to create a nurturing environment for your plants and ensure they grow beautifully!

Requiring no water for maintenance, Vertex Zero is a terrarium that encases real, biologically inactive moss, cultivated in TerraLiving’s own greenhouse and preserved in labs, inside museum-grade geometric glass containers. Live mosses are grown and cultivated in TerraLiving’s greenhouse dubbed the “Moss Lab,” before reaching the peak of their health and preserved for encasement. Using proprietary advanced preservation technology, each patch of live moss is stripped of any water content in low-pressure zones and subzero temperatures to freeze their proteins and biological components, rendering them inactive, but frozen in time.

Designed to take the absolute hassle out of watering and taking care of your plants, WALTY gives them the water they need by simply pulling it out of the atmosphere. Because a singular plant can’t generate and capture enough atmospheric humidity as an entire forest, WALTY basically does that part for your plant. Now it might sound borderline magical, but the way WALTY works is similar to a dehumidifier. A dehumidifier pulls moisture from the air using cold plates that force water droplets to condense on them. The droplets then drip down into a reservoir tank, and when it fills up, you simply empty it out. WALTY’s approach is similar, except it uses that very water to keep your plant hydrated… sort of like a win-win.

Meet the Pico Max, a compact, self-growing planter that turns your kitchen counter into a kitchen garden. From herbs to fruits, veggies, sprouts, succulents, and even leafy greens, Pico Max manages it all. If last year’s Pico was for enthusiasts looking to dip their toes in gardening, Pico Max helps them take gardening more seriously by actually cultivating plants that serve as decor, natural air-purifiers, or as kitchen ingredients. It comes with a wider gardening bed than its predecessor, allowing you to grow even more plants than before. The planter itself comes in a funky set of colors that add vibrance to your decor, and have an integrated window on the front that lets you observe the planter’s water level. Each Pico Max comes with its own dedicated water reservoir and the plant basically waters itself as and when it needs. All you really do is replenish the water reservoir every couple of days and you’re good to go!

Designed by Modern Sprout, the Smart Landscape Growframe is a minimal frame that can be mounted on any wall on your home, and whose functionality is more complex than its simple looks! It nourishes all kinds of plants – from ones that seek low light, to ones that seek bright light. Once mounted on a wall, you can slide your favorite plants into the Growframe, and connect to the Modern Sprout app. The app is a complete godsend! The app features an on/off switch and can be used for customizable programming and pairing recommendations for partial shade, partial sun, and full sun plants. You can easily select and switch between light settings.

Loop is a smart planting system that feeds and tends to your plants while you’re away through an automated irrigation system. The agriculture system is shaped like a plume, flowering from the top and the bottom, keeping the seed modules in a radial row to form a skirt. Each seed module is detachable and securely locks onto one another through junction sockets, forming a link. Along the underbridge of the system’s lid, LEDs disperse light over the plants, adjusting their levels according to the time of day. Users simply add seeds to the modules, position the modules to match up with the irrigation system, lock the top water reservoir into place, then watch as the water drips and the plants grow.

Based on the 3D visualizations developed by the team at The Subdivision, Agrilution operates like most indoor vertical farming products. Nicknamed Plantcube, Agrilution forms the shape of a small refrigerator, containing two sliding shelves that host the crops and soil planters. With interior LED grow lights, the crops inside of Agrilution are nourished with as much mock sunlight as they might need to thrive. In addition to the LED grow lights, Agrilution comes with an app that helps users control the caretaking of their plants. The app uses smart technology in conjunction with vertical farming techniques by indicating to users when their vertical garden might need more water or soil replenishment. Following today’s smart farming and gardening wave, Agrilution turns farming into an accessible and simpler task for those living in smaller spaces who would still like to develop sustainable lifestyle practices.

There are a lot of factors that contribute to a plant’s health – soil, water, sunlight, pests, etc. But there isn’t any easy way of knowing what your plant needs… the BioCollar is changing that. Designed by students at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design, the BioCaller is a wearable that builds empathy between the wearer and the connected plant. When paired with a piece of hardware that goes into the planter, the collar helps you understand the plant’s needs through real-time feedback. It becomes moderately tighter when the plant needs water, gets warm when the plant has too much sunlight and vibrates when the plant has an infestation. In doing so, the wearable aims at letting the plant easily communicate its needs to you, and enables you to be a better plant parent.

The Nano Garden features a two-part planter that waters and aerates itself thanks to its clever design. The pot itself holds water, while the floater inside houses the plant-pod – an all-in-one compostable pod that contains seeds and nutrients suspended within a growth medium. The pod floats on water, taking in as much as the plants need… and as the water level depletes, the floating pod descends downwards into the planter. This allows you to visually gauge how much water there is within your Nano Garden’s reservoir, allowing you to easily fill it up. A full water reservoir lasts anywhere from 2 weeks to a month (depending on the plant you grow), and the plant technically waters itself – so you never need to worry about over or under-watering your plants. The planter is accompanied by a neat light that sits on a telescopic arm that you can height-adjust as your plant grows.

Lively Greens is essentially a horticultural therapy table that uses aquaponics, a combination of aquaculture and hydroponics, to grow plant life. Lively Greens is comprised of a fish tank and a cluster of five pots for growing plants. As the fish in the tank swim and grow, the water turns rich in nutrients, which feeds the hydroponic plant system, allowing the plant life above to thrive and eventually be harvested. Those who help cultivate Lively Greens only have to do the initial planting and watch the fish take care of the rest. Once the plant life and soil have merged with the water in the fish tank, nutrients from the effluent-rich water, as a result of the presence of marine life, help nourish the plants and sustain a healthy growth cycle.

Designed to be the world’s first ‘living furniture series’, the patent-pending BloomingTables allow you to grow herbs and vegetables, cultivate microgreens, or enjoy the beauty of succulents and vining plants in the comfort of your home. With homes and apartments growing smaller and balconies becoming more of a luxury, the BloomingTables provide a unique aesthetic compromise – giving you a table along with the added benefit of a tiny terrarium for your house plants. The BloomingTables come in 4 sizes – a desk, coffee table, entryway table, and a side table – all featuring a waterproof acrylic trough-shaped base and a flat glass panel on top. Each table is equipped with a drain valve at the bottom (just in case you want to drain out any excess water from your planter’s soil), and the glass panel on top is removable too, allowing you to easily water, prune, and tend to your plants!

The post Plant-friendly products designed to fulfill your indoor gardening aspirations + cultivate a sustainable lifestyle! first appeared on Yanko Design.

This chic self-watering planter uses a porous terracotta inner vessel to absorb water and hydrate the soil

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The A-Pot displays elegance not just in execution but in thinking too. The simple two-piece self-watering planter uses an outer vessel made from glass, so you can see the water level, and an inner vessel made from terracotta, to place your soil and plant in. The way the self-watering mechanism then works is rather simple. Instead of the soil or a wicking medium pulling water towards the roots (so you don’t need to manually pour water on the plant every few days), the inner terracotta vessel does the job, thanks to its porous structure. Simply placing the terracotta vessel in water allows it to absorb the water and hydrate the soil inside. Using osmosis, the terracotta vessel only pulls as much water as the soil needs, and the result is an incredibly elegant little planter that autonomously waters the plant within while looking beautiful enough to keep in any part of your home!

The A-Pot is a winner of the Red Dot Design Concept Award for the year 2021.

Designer: Zonesum for Dowan

The post This chic self-watering planter uses a porous terracotta inner vessel to absorb water and hydrate the soil first appeared on Yanko Design.

The Bauhaus school of design inspires the striking stained glass colors and geometric shapes of these vases!

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Trio is a collection of three stained glass vases inspired by the Bauhaus school of art and design to bring a timeless edge to the traditional glass vase.

Finding the perfect vase for flowers is sometimes the most fun when arranging bouquets. Bunchier flowers deserve a bulkier, more bulbous vase. While more delicate flower arrangements could use a skinny, minimalist vase. You know the right vase when you see it.

Vases also carry a long, intricate history in ceramics and glass-making that dates back centuries. Taking notes from one historical art school of design, Bauhaus, Ashley Case designed three different vases in its style to accommodate all types of flower arrangements and create a collection called Trio.

Case’s study on Bauhaus design took shape in the art school’s commitment to simplicity, bold colors, and geometric lines. All three vases are molded from sturdy stained glass that creates shadows of color when natural light pours through them. The first vase, a deep cobalt blue, forms three-quarters of a circle and suspends in midair from a black steel cradle that entirely surrounds the vase.

Then, a vertical, rectangular vase coated in lemon yellow stained glass remains in place inside of a four-bar black steel crate. Finally, an inverted triangular vase dipped in scarlet red balances above an empty platform inside a similar black steel crate. All three vases are undoubtedly inspired by Bauhaus design, an art school devoted to integrating a timelessly modern look into any era.

The Bauhaus school of design came to life in 1919, following geometric and abstract styles of design that feature little to no emotion and personality. Instead, the school encourages a timeless look that nods to no cultural or historical aspect in particular. Ashley Case’s collection of vases called Trio embodies Bauhaus through their minimal profiles and strikingly colorful displays that create dazzling shadows of light color to hearken back to the art school’s heyday.

Designer: Ashley Case

Each vase is molded from the stained glass in striking colors reminiscent of the Bauhaus school of design. 

Each vase can accommodate a variety of different flower arrangements, according to your personal taste. 

This modern eco-home features a garden roof and integrates the surrounding forest into its design!

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Hugging House is a modern eco-home architecture concept that features a garden roof and incorporates the natural landscape of the land into its layout.

Noticing the devasting changes that come with climate change, most modern architects look to the natural world for inspiration to help preserve it. Whether that means building a self-sustainable home using a ‘passive house’ construction method or incorporating biophilia into the design scheme, architects interpret earth’s many ecosystems in exciting and different ways.

Cuba-based Veliz Arquitecto conceptualized a modern eco home called Hugging House that integrates the land’s rolling terrain and surrounding trees into the layout of the building.

Hugging House is a large, bi-level, cantilevered home located somewhere with dense forestry and overhead treetop canopies. The two sections that comprise Hugging House merge together as if in an embrace. Concrete slabs comprise the home’s surrounding driveway that leads to the ground level and outdoor leisure areas.

Veliz Arquitecto’s Hugging House is still only in its conceptual phase, but if brought to life, Hugging House’s location would be fully incorporated into the layout of the home. Describing the design in his own words, Veliz Arquitectos notes, “We have taken advantage of the slopes of the land in order to create visual connections at different heights with the existing vegetation and beyond the landscape, as well as [used] the premises with which we always try to characterize the project.”

Choosing to merge the outdoor areas with the home’s entire layout led to some exciting design choices including a garden roof and abstract overall frame. The Hugging House’s garden roof is located in a terrace-like enclosure where residents can lay out and feel as close to nature as if they were sitting on the ground below.

In addition to the garden roof, Hugging House features a swimming pool, fire pit, and concrete driveway. On the inside, residents and guests can enjoy a living room, kitchen, dining room, bathroom, and laundry room.

Designer: Veliz Arquitecto

The inside also features garden walls and ceilings to further the home’s biophilic design principle. 

Upstairs, natural stone walls give the bedroom a sultry, cozy appeal.

The dining area and bar room feature bright and dark design elements respectively. 

A floating staircase brings guests from the living room to the second floor. 

This Japanese-inspired residence features a multi-tiered, sloping roof that mimics the gentle curve of fallen leaves!

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Four Leaves Villa designed by Kentaro Ishida Architects Studio (KIAS) is a form of organic architecture with a gently twisted, multi-tiered roof that mimics the sloping curve of fallen leaves and a central garden courtyard, the home’s concealed centerpiece.

150 kilometers from the buzzing city streets of Tokyo, Japan, a forested plot of land in Karuizawa, Nagano prefecture of Japan, is home to a weekend retreat designed to mirror the fallen leaves that surround it. Dubbed Four Leaves Villa, the privately-owned residence is a form of organic architecture with a split-level roof designed by Kentaro Ishida Architects Studio (KIAS) that mimics the undulating, overlapping pattern of fallen leaves.

Organic architecture is a philosophy of architecture with a primary goal of harmonizing human habitation with nature. Following the philosophy of organic architecture, the varying orientations of Four Leaves Villa’s living and dining spaces were specifically chosen with consideration to the use of each space and the amount of natural sunlight that might benefit each room’s function.

The living and dining areas face southeast to collect pools of natural sunlight, brightening each room during the day for meals and social gatherings. Then, the bedrooms are posed west to catch views of the forest’s dense brushwood that provides a sense of privacy during the day and coziness at night.

The gently twisted roofs also provide plenty of overhangs to brace guests against the blaze of sun rays. The constructional combination of a concave and convex roof makes for a dynamic interior volume. Where the roof inclines outside, the interior ceiling, lined with exposed wooden beams, reaches lofty heights.

Describing the roof in their own words, KIAS notes, “Every roof has been designed as a Ruled Surface in which straight Laminated Veneer Lumber joists are arranged continuously to form an organic geometry. A series of wooden joists are exposed on the ceiling highlighting the dynamic spatial characters of each living space.”

The interior living, dining, and sleeping spaces are split between three interconnected structural volumes placed on site amongst a preexisting lot of trees. From above, the open-air garden courtyard functions as the home’s centerpiece and the point where the three structural volumes meet, offering an outdoor leisure area where the home’s guests can come together and spend time in nature.

Designer: Kentaro Ishida Architects Studio (KIAS)

Four Leaves Villa’s floor plan reveals the three structural volumes without their roofs and the garden courtyard that functions as their centerpiece. 

This hanging wire shelving is designed to showcase each plants individuality and unique purpose!

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REN is a flagship plant store committed to revitalizing dying plants and showcasing each plant for its individuality and unique needs.

Whenever we want to bring some life to our rooms, filling them up with mini indoor gardens usually does the trick. However, taking care of plants comes with its own list of challenges–keeping tabs on the amount of sunlight and water required for certain plants to thrive can get overwhelming. Sooner than we know it, our favorite plants are dying and we’re back at square one. In Mita, Tokyo, social advocacy design studio Nosigner opened REN, a flagship ornamental plant store whose aim is to bring life back to dying plants.

Under close leadership from Nobuaki Kawarhara, fourth-generation Tokyo Ikebana, REN is operated by a team of plant caretakers who specialize in the Japanese art of Ikebana, or the art of flower arrangement. Considering the launch of REN, Nosigner suggests that our love for ornamental plants dates back to our primitive memories of living in forests. Once towns and cities became popularized in the 19th-century, our close proximity to forests and plant life to replaced with city infrastructure and paved roads. Since then, we’ve been craving the presence of greenery in our rooms and day-to-day lives.

REN is a flagship store focused on revitalizing our relationship to plants, noting that, “Ornamental plants brought in to create a pseudo-natural atmosphere in indoor spaces are not adapted to the environment and are therefore weak and often die. While we need ornamental plants, we also have a distorted relationship with them as part of our ecosystem.”

In designing REN’s interior space, Nosigner aimed to look at the room as a single vase to accentuate the beauty of each plant. Swapping out the number of plants for quality, Nosigner built a moveable wire shelf that weaves throughout the entire store, providing individual shelves where each plant is showcased for its vitality and unique personality.

Designer: NOSIGNER

This biophilic air purifier uses 100% fully biodegradable filters to combat landfill waste!

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Olus is a compact, biophilic air purifier designed for those living in small city spaces and is stocked with 100% fully biodegradable filters to combat landfill waste.

In major cities, dealing with air pollution is a given. We check the AQI just like we check the weather. As soon as the AQI slips into the yellow and worse yet, red territories, that’s when our air purifiers start whirring. However, living in small city spaces makes dragging bulky air purifiers from the closet feel like a chore and when everyone’s using one, the waste produced from discarding used air filters becomes another problem. That’s why Louie Duncan created Olus, a compact, biophilic air purifier designed with 100% fully biodegradable air filters.

Breathing in polluted air is physically unhealthy and the mental strain that comes from dealing with its effects only amplifies the stress. Then, the waste produced as a result makes poor air quality that much more difficult to combat, garnering 6,000 tonnes of air filter waste every year, all of which ends up in landfills. Most air purifiers taking on a bulky build with a clinical aesthetic, so Duncan aimed to give Olus an inviting look with biophilic accents that warm up its personality to enhance the product-user relationship. A digital display panel also reveals the room’s AQI, temperature, and other data.

Taking to nature for inspiration, Olus features organic forms, patterns, and textures like a moss-covered exterior and abstract trims that resemble flower petals. The filter, fan, and motor encased inside Olus’s body operate the product’s purification method in a similar fashion to most air purifiers, except Olus only works with 100% fully biodegradable filters.

The two-stage air filtration process purifies the air in any room, with the interior fan drawing in air to push through a layer of dried moss that removes large pollutants before passing through a high-efficiency particulate air filter that removes 90% of fine particulate matter. The plant-based biodegradable air filters are made from polylactic acid, a derivative of corn plants, and can be sent to Olus following use where they’ll be composted.

Designer: Louie Duncan x Christian P Kerrigan Architecture

An interior look reveals that even the encased fan resembles flower petals.

The fan, filtration system, and motor are stacked inside of Olus. 

Dried moss coats the exterior of Olus with a preliminary filtration system. 

Users can easily replace the air filters by dissembling Olus into three parts. 

Duncan created Olus to have an air purifier on the market that produces zero waste while cleaning the air we breathe.

This passive house features a living green roof that merges the home with its forested surroundings!

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Hill House is a passive house designed and constructed by Snegiri Architects with a living green roof that blends the home seamlessly with its natural woodland surroundings.

Passive houses and green homes are rising in popularity, cropping up across the globe, and slowly, but steadily establishing a new standard for residence architecture. Photovoltaic panels, living roofs, and rainwater collection systems are some of the most common sustainable and energy-efficient elements that grace the outside and inside of such homes. Snegiri Architects, a firm based in Saint Petersburg, Russia, finished work on a passive residence called Hill House, complete with a living green roof that merges the home with the nearby forest.

Building new homes, especially passive houses, in dense woodlands without felling trees is a near-impossible task unless you incorporate them into the home’s layout. Managing to preserve the forested lot’s preexisting trees, Snegiri Architects built Hill House to be entirely integrated into the surrounding environment. Plotted with diverse plant life and shrubbery, Hill House’s living green roof sprawls with a grass carpet filled with stonecrop and dwarf plants including chamomile and sedum.

The gradual incline of Hill House’s green roof conceals the home’s structural presence, bringing the home inch by inch into the bordering woods. The rest of Hill House’s exterior strikes a balance between black-stained wood-paneled facades and natural, unstained wood-paneled eaves. With this contrast, the home blends naturally into its surroundings, but its interiors remain bright with light window accents.

From top to bottom, the Hill House undoubtedly reaches the energy efficiency standard set by passive house building techniques. The terrace and most of the rooms are oriented towards the home’s sunny side to collect the maximum amount of sunlight during the day and energy-saving windows prevent the heated or cooled air from leaving the home. The home is also ventilated with air recovery, and Swedish slab, monolith, mineral wool, and linseed oil-soaked larch all provide the home with insulation from its foundation to its roof.

Designer: Snegiri Architects