Tag Archives: house plants

A Plant Companion That Moves With The Sun Fitting Perfectly Into The Korean Culture

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In a world where the sun plays a significant role in shaping preferences for living spaces, a unique product has emerged to bridge the gap between lifestyle and the desire for a sun-soaked environment. The innovative SPOT, a pet plant inspired by the beloved Toy Story, brings a touch of whimsy and practicality to the lives of those who are away from home during the day.

Designer: Dami Seo

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Koreans have a cultural inclination towards south-facing directions for their homes, favoring abundant sunlight throughout the day. However, modern lifestyles often lead people away from home during peak daylight hours, creating a paradox between their preference for sunlit spaces and their absence during the sunniest times.

Drawing inspiration from Toy Story, SPOT takes on a personality of its own when the owner is away. Just like Woody and his adventures, SPOT enjoys the warm sunlight in the south-facing direction, making the most of the daylight hours that the owner might miss.

The creators of SPOT have ingeniously crafted its form based on Woody’s rhythmic hat line, adding an extra layer of charm and nostalgia for fans of the iconic movie series. This attention to detail enhances the emotional connection users may feel with their sun-loving companion.

SPOT’s design mimics a sunflower’s ability to move towards the sun. Equipped with sensors, SPOT can adjust its position to capture the optimal amount of sunlight, ensuring that users can enjoy the warmth without the need to move the plant manually. This dynamic feature aligns with the varying sunlight patterns throughout the day.

For users returning home, SPOT adds an element of surprise and delight. By detecting the SPOT’s location, users can playfully interact with their sun-loving companion, creating a unique and entertaining experience. The wheels at the bottom of the product enable SPOT to move towards the sunlight source, making it a dynamic and engaging addition to any home.

SPOT’s ability to move is not only entertaining but also practical. Equipped with sensors on both sides, SPOT can navigate around objects in the house, ensuring a seamless and safe journey towards the sunlight. The autonomy of movement enhances user convenience, aligning with the modern desire for smart and responsive home devices.

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To keep SPOT energized and ready for its sun-seeking adventures, a user-friendly charging unit is provided. SPOT can effortlessly navigate to the charging station, making the recharging process a hassle-free experience. Additionally, SPOT’s easy-to-clean and disassemble design ensures that maintenance is a breeze.

SPOT not only adds a touch of magic inspired by Toy Story to your home but also addresses the practical challenge of aligning sunlight preferences with a dynamic lifestyle. With its adaptability, autonomy, and entertaining features, SPOT is more than just a pet plant; it’s a delightful companion that brings joy and sunshine into the lives of its users.

The post A Plant Companion That Moves With The Sun Fitting Perfectly Into The Korean Culture first appeared on Yanko Design.

8 Peaceful New Year’s Resolutions For Your Home

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Designer: Kenji Abe for ifuki

As we usher into 2023, it’s time to carry forward the tradition of making customary New Year’s resolutions. Some common resolutions include weight loss goals, financial goals, eating clean, self-improvement, working out, following our passion, and so on. This year, let’s focus on home improvement and make some achievable resolutions for our abodes as we are spending a lot of time indoors. We must ensure that our homes are clean, well-organized, and comfortable to use. Maintaining the house requires hard work and effort, and these tips can help us organize better. So let’s celebrate 2023 with hope and positivity, as these resolutions can easily fit a busy lifestyle.

1. Decluttering

Decluttering is one of the easiest and most cost-effective ways to bring a sense of clarity and positivity into your home.

  • Adopt the minimalist lifestyle. It is not about getting rid of everything but just keeping what you need. We tend to accumulate and hoard many things that we do not require. It takes a little effort to eliminate and donate the extra things. Check whatever you have before you buy more.
  • Take some inspiration from the Marie Kondo style of organizing so that whatever product you possess sparks joy. This is a great way to make space for what matters and a Zen vibe.

Designer: Radha Sotomayor

2. Deep clean

It is time to pack all your Christmas decorations as the holiday season is over. Deep clean the rooms and create a maintenance routine to make the home a better and brighter place.

  • Device a daily, weekly, and monthly cleaning routine which is easy to adhere to. Various checklists are available online. Choose the one that is best suited for your working style.
  • Always keep a basic cleaning kit in each bathroom and kitchen for easier accessibility, quicker cleaning, and keeping the home more organized.

3. Organize your storage

Small habits that we practice every day will help us to stay organized and create a tidy home.

  • It is highly recommended to store items of one category together. Demarcate different sections for keeping the toys, electronic chargers, books, clothes, craft supplies, papers, stationary, wrapping paper, and so on. It will become easier to search for things.
  • Store your items in boxes, trays, and baskets. Labeling the baskets and containers makes it easier to find them amidst the chaos. Try to store vertically so that all the objects are visible in one go.
  • Stop the paper clutter, as envelopes, catalogs, and documents tend to create a lot of chaos.
  • Don’t forget to periodically organize the digital clutter of your phone, laptop, and tablet, keep deleting extra emails, photographs and unsubscribing to emails, to name a few.

Designer: Leydi Rofman

4. Clean and Organize the Kitchen

Your kitchen has worked hard during the holidays, so it is time for some deep cleaning and organizing.

  • The first step is to empty all the kitchen ingredients and check what you need to keep, discard or donate. Check the expiry date of the non-perishable items and canned tins before buying and adding new grocery items to the kitchen.
  • Empty the contents of the kitchen cabinets and divide the storage into items that we use frequently and rarely used items.
  • Give a spring clean to all the drawers and cabinets and organize them in a grouping technique that suits your lifestyle. Place the items closest to where their function is performed.
  • Neatly organized containers and tins make cooking easier and more efficient.
  • Purchase additional storage and organization tools like roll-out shelves, baskets, storage containers, cabinet risers, and drop-downs to improve the kitchen’s efficiency.

Designer: Nancy Eaton

5. Organize your Home Office

Many of us are into hybrid models and work-from-home models, so we must ensure that the home office helps to improve focus and productivity. Also, we must prevent frequent clutter from building up.

  • Don’t let the pile of papers and documents create chaos. Create a mail station for incoming and outgoing mail. Categorize the papers into different files, place them alphabetically, or the best way is to go paperless.
  • Designate an area for keeping the printer and all the printing supplies. Use the vertical wall space to keep filing systems, hangers, shelving, and whiteboards.
  • Organize all the office supplies in containers, drawers, and baskets and keep them out of view so that it imparts a decluttered look.
  • Organize the books according to size and color, and genre.

Designer: norse.keeb

6. Invest in Smart and Energy-efficient Appliances

Here is how you can conserve energy and recurring electricity costs.

  • Invest in programmable thermostats, smart appliances, and smart lighting to save electricity costs. One can control the heating or cooling of the house via the smartphone application.
  • In case you need to replace white goods like refrigerators, air conditioners, and dishwashers, they should be replaced with Energy Star or energy-efficient appliances.
  • Replace all incandescent bulbs and CFL lights with LED lights because these lights are highly durable, they are long-lasting, and come with superior energy—efficiency.

Designer: Samsung

7. Healthy Habits and Sustainable Lifestyle

We should be mindful of protecting our climate, and sustainable habits should be the core of our home décor. Some of the best ways to go green and reduce the carbon footprint are as follows:

  • Create a clean and restful environment by tidying up your clothes every day instead of throwing them on the chair.
  • Make it a point to switch off the lights when you leave any room — turning off the lights when not in use reduces the electricity bills and extends the bulb’s life.
  • Reduce disposables, avoid single-use packaging, shop with reusable bags, and avoid prepackaged food by buying from the local farmer’s market.
  • Air-drying clothes is more eco-friendly than using a dryer. It not only saves electricity costs but also reduces wrinkles and increases the lifespan of the clothes.
  • Improve the thermal insulation of the house by caulking around the doors and windows and weather-stripping. This is one of the best ways to reduce air leakage and a cost-effective way to reduce heating and cooling costs.
  • Seal and insulate the heat ducts to improve the heating and cooling efficiency of the home.
  • Improve the water efficiency of your home with low-flow showerheads, as they can reduce water consumption by nearly 40% and result in significant savings on annual heating costs.
  • Invest in low-maintenance and highly durable materials, as they can reduce the wear and tear of your home and enable long-term cost savings.
  • Try composting at home, as it is a process in which organic kitchen and garden waste, like food scrap and leaves, break down into the soil. This is a perfect way to recycle waste from the kitchen and garden and convert it into nutrient-rich fertilizer for the garden.
  • Segregate your wet waste from dry waste and place it in bins and bags in places that are easy to access. This segregation makes it easy to further segregate dry waste into different categories.

Designer: Katie Maris

8. Decorate with Plants

Plants are a great way to add beauty and color, it allows us to distress and lower anxiety levels.

  • They come with air-purifying qualities that eliminate toxins and maintain good humidity levels indoors.
  • Some of the common pollutants include mold spores, bacteria, and VOCs (volatile organic compounds) like benzene, xylene, toluene, formaldehyde, and trichloroethylene that are usually emitted from chemical cleaners and household products.

Designer: TerraLiving

The post 8 Peaceful New Year’s Resolutions For Your Home first appeared on Yanko Design.

Blume lets your plants bloom alongside trellis planter

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Plant holders can be as simple as possible. You don’t really need to have it designed elaborately it since the plants that you’ll put there are most likely decorative enough. But of course you sometimes want to have something that is also pretty or at least interesting, even if it’s just something to hold or store your plant babies. And if you treat the plants as part of your home and your family, you’d want to have the best of everything for them, including a playful and customizable “place to let them grow and flourish”.

Designer: Nikki Alagha

This special planter called Blume is not just something that will house your plant or plants of the moment. It actually comes with a trellis that can be linked together according to your specifications and can “grow” alongside your plant. You can link the different parts with a threaded knob and they can go in all directions that you want, upwards, downwards, sideways, etc. A design like this actually makes it look like the planter is organic like your plant and can give them space to thrive other than the usual straightforward manner.

This planter is made from various materials. The base uses cement while the trellises are made from wood and the knobs are metal. The base planter is 8 inches high while the trellis can go as high as 30 inches depending on the design and style that you want. While the official photos show natural cement, white, and gold, there are also custom colors available if you want your planter to be more colorful and add to your plants’ natural greens and browns.

Since Blume is customizable and made-to-order, there is still a bit of sustainability at play since there is technically no mass production happening. The fact that you can also make it more personal can be more attractive for some plant parents that want to have more interesting accessories that can have an emotional value.

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Blow is an air purifier that also doubles as a plant caretaker

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For those of us who live in buildings or spaces with air-conditioning, there is the tendency to keep the windows closed especially during hot weather. But one of the things that the pandemic has taught us is that there is a need to have free-flowing air around us and so we need to crack open that window every once in a while or at least have an air purifier in your house to make sure that the air you’re breathing is still pure. This concept design has turned this device into part of your room decoration and also into a “planterior” air purifier.

Designer: Yunho Kim

The usual air purifier is really more functional as its main purpose is really to do as its name says. But this concept design for the Blow “planterior” air purifier was born out of the desire to make the space where the device is placed not become just a “dead space” where the purifier is just standing there. The inspiration for the design itself are the windows that some of us don’t want to open anymore, either because of heat, humidity, and other health-related reasons. The idea also was added for the commonplace “button” to not just become a mechanical solution.

The Blow design mimics that of a window, or particularly the venetian blinds but this time it’s left to right and vice versa rather than up and down. When you slide the handle, the cover on the front slowly opens and in turn, also turns on the air purifier. How strong the flow becomes depends on the degree that you operate the handle. So it mimics the natural wind that we feel when opening a window and how much wind comes in depending on how much that window is opened. The air is purified through a filter and then discharged through that window frame. The carbon and HEPA filters are easily replaceable to ensure that you’re really breathing in purified air.

The Blow air purifier is also designed so you can place plants on the “windowsill” and give it not just purified air but also lighting through its LED lights at the top. It looks like how you’d place plants on an actual windowsill so you can “grow” them better even if it’s far from an actual window and sunlight. Of course, plant experts would say that natural is still better but this is the next best thing if there’s no area to give them natural light and air.

You can place this air purifier in three different ways in your room. You can use it with leg stands and place anywhere in your living room or office space or you can put it on a table or the floor directly without the stands. You can also hang it on a wall using brackets, giving it more of a windowsill vibes. It’s definitely better designed and more functional than most air purifiers so it’s something a condo-dweller like me can consider.

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A LEGO-inspired modular indoor garden system doubles up as a fun DIY arrangement

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Planterior is a LEGO-inspired indoor garden system that uses LEGO’s building block method to attach modular planters to a wall-mountable base platform.

Since WFH orders were first put in place, we all went looking for ways to make our living spaces feel more like homes. Whether it was a matter of finding a new couch or filling our walls with our favorite pieces of artwork, our ‘temporary’ home offices soon became where we wanted to spend most of our time even outside of work.

Designer: Dasol Jeong

Countless indoor garden designs have also emerged to help enliven our WFH spaces and make them more intimate. One of the latest, a LEGO-inspired indoor garden called Planterior by designer Dasol Jeong merges LEGO’s building blocks with the frame of a bulletin board to create a unique, modular garden system for any WFH space.

Planterior keeps the shape and size of a traditional bulletin board and integrates a gardening system into its structure to bring greenery to any workspace. Describing Planterior’s inspiration in their own words, Dasol notes, “Due to the influence of fine dust and COVID-19, people, who do not have the opportunity to access plants outdoors, are increasingly putting plants into their homes…Home gardening and plant territories are gaining vitality [as a result].”

Using LEGO’s approach to building, each individual planter attaches to the larger board the same way LEGO building blocks are stacked together. Playing into this stacking method, Planterior keeps a modular structure by design, allowing users to create endless configurations for their indoor garden.

The post A LEGO-inspired modular indoor garden system doubles up as a fun DIY arrangement first appeared on Yanko Design.

This sustainable air purifier naturally cleanses your air with oxygen-boosting plants

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It looks like a vertical planter, but it’s much more than just that. Meet the Respira, an air purifier that uses nature to uplift spaces and cleanse the air around you the old-fashioned and effective way. Apart from giving your interior spaces a nice touch of greenery, Respira also adds additional humidity, evaporative cooling, and naturally absorbs gases and particulate matter to enrich your home with fresh oxygen and clean air.

After 5 years of experience designing some of the largest and most effective ‘living walls’ for companies, corporates, and offices, Mitchell and Dylan of New Earth Solutions decided to focus on the one recurring question they kept getting from their clients – “Can I put these at home?” You see, we spend a major chunk of our time indoors, more so during the pandemic, and that erodes our connection with the great outdoors and nature specifically. Aside from the fact that the air indoors isn’t always as fresh as the air outdoors, there’s also something to be said about how cutting oneself off from nature negatively affects one’s mental health. Respira reimagines and reintroduces that connection with nature. It’s a smaller, more domestic-friendly version of New Earth Solution’s large living wall installations, but is backed by a biophilic design that integrates technology and plants into a symbiotic solution.

The Respira features 13 carefully selected plants known for their ability to purify the air of toxins, VOCs, and pollutants. The plants rest vertically against a front facade, allowing them to look like a living wall that adds a dash of vibrant green to your spaces. Positioned right behind the plants is the air-filtration and hydroponic planting systems that filter the air while keeping your plants flourishing. Air is pulled from the top and passed through a reusable pre-filter that traps any particles. The air then passes through the roots of the plant, and good microbes living in plants’ roots break pollutants down into nutrients that help the plants grow. The Respira’s self-watering hydroponic system allows the plants to flourish without human intervention… in fact, all you need to do is plug the device in, fill the water reservoir every 10-14 days, and add a prepackaged nutrient mix every 6 months. The Respira self-waters, self-lights, and self-purifies while naturally humidifying spaces and regulating the temperature in your room. A simple touch-interface lets you view the time and temperature, while controlling aspects of the Respira like the fan speed, light, and water. If the Respira runs low on water or nutrients, notifications are promptly sent to your smartphone.

The Respira comes in two colors (black and white) and features an online nursery of plants to choose from. Plants get shipped directly to you in biodegradable packaging, or alternatively, you can cultivate your own plant clippings. When assembled, the Respira takes on multiple roles. It naturally purifies your air while uplifting your spaces with greenery. It regulates humidity and temperature, and does it all autonomously with minimal human intervention… and the best part? It never needs a filter replacement and generates absolutely zero waste. Just healthy, oxygenated air!

Designer: New Earth Solutions Inc

Click Here to Buy Now: $432 $625 (31% off). Hurry, only 7/35 left! Raised over $130,000.

Respira – The Air Purifying Garden that Takes Care of Itself

Respira is an air purifier that improves the air quality in your home by pulling air through the plant’s root zone where beneficial microorganisms capture and break down toxins from the air, in a process known as biofiltration.

How it Works

Air is actively pulled through the top of the unit, removing dust and large particulate matter before passing through the biologically active root zone. Beneficial organisms within the root zone capture and permanently destroy airborne toxins and chemicals that we would otherwise be breathing. Naturally purified air is then released through the front of the unit.

Beyond air purification, Respira adds additional humidity, evaporative cooling, and a direct connection to nature to improve the comfort of your home. Respira is also IOT enabled, allowing you to connect the system to your home network and monitor plant health and air quality from wherever you are.

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Click Here to Buy Now: $432 $625 (31% off). Hurry, only 7/35 left! Raised over $130,000.

This hydroponic smart garden mounts on your wall to remove the air pollutants accumulated in quarantine

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We get it – wanting to be in nature with fresh air after being holed up in quarantine for practically an entire year. In quarantine, I’m currently living in a tiny apartment in a city with an AQI that seems to perpetually read, “Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups” without a car and no want for transportation other than my own two feet. Trust me, I get it. Being locked up for so long can make you feel stir-crazy. To make up for it, I’ve bought more plants and flowers for myself in 2020 than I have my entire life. The team at Respira, experts in commercial living walls quote that 90% of our time is spent indoors. If my math is correct, with stricter stay-at-home orders put in place, then that’s a lot of days. In efforts to keep our indoor spaces feeling open and healthy, Mitchell Cowburn and Dylan Robertson founded the company New Earth Solutions, an Ontario-based firm focused on creating low-energy biophilic design solutions. With New Earth Solutions, they designed Respira, an air-purifying, modular wall garden that takes care of itself.

Respira, “is a hydroponic smart garden that optimizes the plant’s ability to remove indoor pollutants from your home through the science of biofiltration,” as described on the team’s website. Biofiltration is simply a natural form of air purification that takes place when microbes that live near a plant’s roots help recirculate clean air into indoor living spaces. Essentially, toxic air pollutants drift into Respira’s purifying system and an integrated fan pushes that air towards the roots of Respira’s plants, which cleanse the toxic air and turn it into healthy air we can breathe. The whole system comes in either white or black, with a 20W LED grow-light, and is manufactured using sustainably-sourced ABS plastic. Advertised as a garden that takes care of itself, Respira comes equipped with an integrated monitor that manages water temperature, levels, and flow, air temperature, humidity and TVOC levels, and the total amount of dissolved solids present in the plant’s water. If that’s not enough to keep up with the needs of your garden, text alerts can also be set so you can be notified each time one of your plants needs acute attention and Respira’s fully-automated care system allows users to tend to their plants from anywhere. The only responsibilities left for users are filling the water basin every ten days, changing the nutrients every six months, and washing the prefilter every two months. Check it out mom, I can feed my plants miles away from home.

The work that comes with taking care of a Respira plant system is, unsurprisingly, similar to taking care of everyday house plants, but by advertising their “backed-by-science” biofiltration system, Respira attempts to set their design above the rest. Soil biofiltration has garnered a lot of attention in the search for greener air purification models, but it’s still a relatively young technology. Installing biofiltration systems in living spaces can produce cleaner air, but leave it for bigger industrial spaces. The truth is, plant management is easy enough if your living space can accommodate it, and taking the time out to learn how to care for each one of your plants and their specific needs might get you closer to enjoying nature from behind closed doors than responding to a text ever could. Besides, I know of an outdoor nursery that sells ivy for ten bucks a pop and it’s within walking distance.

Designer: New Earth Solutions

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