Tag Archives: greenery

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 concrete restaurant merges brutalist architecture with a vertical garden design for an inviting green vibe!

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Walking into the Loop Design Studio’s Playground Restaurant, patrons will feel transported to some whimsical greenhouse somewhere in the middle of their concrete city.

When a new restaurant opens up, it has the potential to change the entire vibe of your neighborhood. Restaurants have to make sense of the neighborhood they come into and contribute something new to it. The new Playground Restaurant in the commercial hub of Chandigarh, India tries to do just that by incorporating familiar brutalist and modernist interior design elements and blending those with blooming plant life to give the recognizable concrete look playful, green energy.

A cinder block wall forms an irregular building pattern and merges a concrete look with a vertical garden of potted plants. Overhead, a translucent glass ceiling disperses soft light, and the surrounding walls, plotted with concrete planters and greenery, aerate the restaurant’s open-air space. While markings of the city’s modernist origins appear throughout the restaurant, those are juxtaposed with key biophilic design elements.

The industrial ceiling is softened with vintage hanging lamps and surrounding greenery. Even the walls, made from protruding cinder blocks, are bustling with vines and plant life. The cinder blocks assemble an irregular pattern, stacked on top of one another at varied orientations. Loop Design Studio filled the blocks’ exposed cores with vintage glass Edison light bulbs that emanate warm, golden light and the blocks that jut out from the wall with potted plants.

The wall between Playground Restuarant’s cinder block walls is lined with audio cassette tapes. A woodfire oven sets the stage for the restaurant’s elevated, cozier corner that features terracotta flooring with polished cobalt blue tiles.

Rustic, mismatched wooden tables fill the interior of the Playground, enhancing its cozy appeal. Flanking both sides of a wall lined with audio cassette tapes, the cinder block walls create a sort of shelf system which Loop Design Studio filled up with warm lighting fixtures and plenty of different potted plants, like dracaena and evergreen vines.

The restaurant’s lounge area features webbed woodwork and brass accents to evoke a darker, more romantic mood. By tapping into Chandigarh’s brutalist cityscape while embracing the natural playfulness of biophilic design, Loop Design Studio established a restaurant that feels familiar and sheds new light on the city’s ingrained concrete personality.

Designer: Loop Design Studio

A look at how architecture after COVID-19 will openly embrace and integrate the outdoors

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“If we can’t go outdoors, why can’t the outdoors come to us?” It sounds like the kind of question a five-year-old would ask, but dwell a little on that thought and you start realizing it’s quite an intriguing question. In fact, it’s the design brief for ODA’s latest tower designs. These tower designs from ODA Architecture try to blur the boundaries between the outdoors and indoors… they were originally conceived as a way to alter New York’s predominantly glass-and-metal skyline by introducing an aspect of greenery into it, but in a world dealing with COVID-19, they provide a much more important service by allowing us to experience the outdoors without needing to step out.

ODA’s explorations primarily focus on tower designs, in an attempt to bring versatility and a touch of greenery to NY’s overtly boxy and shiny cityscape. Architectural explorations look at residential units with dedicated ‘greenery zones’ that act as areas of social congregation for the building’s residents. Adorned with curvilinear, organic architecture, and interspersed with greenery, these areas give the residents a break from the concrete-jungle-aesthetic of the skyscraper-filled city. They act as areas of reflection and of allowing people to connect with nature and with one another. Designed specifically for the building’s residents, these ‘shared indoor gardens’ even serve as wellness areas, giving people spaces to exercise, meditate, do yoga, and just take a break from being stuck at home… all while being safely within the confines of your building!

Designer: ODA New York

This series of sheet-metal lamps look like Suprematist hanging planters

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With the allure and appearance of minimal greenery (for the lack of a better term), Katerina Sokolova’s Suprematic lamps for NOOM brighten the home, quite literally, if I may add! The 3-part lamps come fabricated from powder-coated sheet metal and metallic pipe cross-sections, and can be simply assembled by fitting them together using interlocking cutouts.

The lamps cast a warm, downward light that takes on a diffused greenish glow, thanks to Suprematic’s powder-coated color-palette, both illuminating spaces as well as creating a sense of calm, not too different from the calm associated with having plants around you… because the Suprematic does look like an abstract, suprematist Bauhaus take on a planter with plants!

Designer: Kateryna Sokolova for NOOM

Pens That Camouflage As Grass Brighten Up Your Office

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Pooleaf-Grass-Leaf-Pen

This is going to make some cubicle dwellers smile a bit. It’s a set of pens called Pooleaf, and they’re shaped like giant blades of grass. When packed together into a jar, it looks like a tiny bit of greenery. It’s not going to make up for being cooped up in an office while others frolic outside in the sun, but we suppose it’s better than nothing.

The thing is… it’s not exactly cheap. At $5 per pen, it’s going to set you back a bunch to create the effect pictured. Either that, or we just made a mistake and you get more than one per $5; it’s a bit of a confusing product site.

[ Product Page ] VIA [ LikeCool ]