Grovemade’s Hardwood Cups & Planters Are An Affordable & Eco-Friendly Way To Organize Your Desk

Whether you’re working from home, or in a corporate office, you still need an ergonomic and well-designed desk. A desk is probably one of the most important pieces of furniture in our modern lives, only because we spend the majority of our day on it. You may be typing away to glory, munching away on a snack, or simply fidgeting with a random object – you do end up spending hours on your desk. And hence, it’s really important that your desk be neat, tidy, and uncluttered. Not only will this improve your work routine and productivity, but it will also help you maintain a clearer and more streamlined mindset. And, I’ve discovered that adding limited, quality, and innovative products to my desk setup can help me in achieving these goals! And an excellent addition to your workdesk would be Grovemade’s planters and pen cups.

Designer: Grovemade

Grovemade’s desk accessories and office gear always tend to be pretty immaculate. They’re simple, well-designed, minimalist, and highly functional. They are utilitarian yet good-looking pieces that are an added bonus to your workdesk. And Grovemade’s newly expanded collection of planters and pen cups fit the bill perfectly! Made the hard old school way in Grovemade’s Portland OR factory, the cups, planters, and dishes are carved from solid maple or walnut. The detailed pieces are then hand-sanded and finished with a clear vegetable-based oil which highlights the natural warmth, elegance, and sheer beauty of the wood.

The collection basically consists of cups, dishes, and planters in a variety of different woods. The cups are tall containers that are ideal for holding your pens, pencils, scissors, markers, etc. The dishes are wider and can be used to store your paper clips, push pins, loose change, and other tiny workplace items. The planters feature a custom metallic liner cup to hold your favorite miniature flora! The cup comes in two metal options – brass and stainless steel. They’re an excellent means to add a touch of green and nature to your otherwise chaotic workdesk.

The entire range of hardwood containers is clean, thoughtfully designed and not to mentioned well-priced. The prices start at $50! You can deck up your desk with some new additions without burning a major hole in your pocket.

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Odd planter concept lets you enjoy observing your plants grow in a fun way

Different people tried to cope with the pandemic quarantine in different and sometimes creative ways. While some were content to catch up with their TV shows and games, others took up new hobbies to while away the time. One of the more popular ones seems to have been growing plants indoors, which is not totally new but also not something adopted by the masses. Even here, there’s a variety of goals and purposes to indoor gardening, though a majority seems to have been focused on the more aesthetic benefits of having lush, green living things inside the home. Ironically, these people seldom go out of their way to grow those plants in equally aesthetic pots, something that this design concept tries to solve right from the start.

Designer: Adrian Min

You can’t just use any container to serve as a plant pot, of course, regardless of how pretty that container might be. There are a few factors to consider to allow a plant to thrive and survive, which is often what informs the design of a planter. These more functional planters, however, aren’t what you’d always call presentable, definitely nothing you’d proudly display on your table or shelf. That doesn’t have to be that way, though, and this “Odd Pot” concept marries form and function in a way that looks not only appealing but also playful.

It’s definitely an odd one for a pot, though mostly because of its unconventional shape. It comes as a tall bowl that stands on three short tapered legs. Instead of a typical brown clay, the pot seems to be made from some terrazzo material, probably ceramic. A removable disc knob juts out from the pot’s back and is the primary mechanism for its highlight feature.

This feature comes in the form of a half capsule that adds something interesting to the presentation while also giving the viewer a different way to look at the plant in the pot. This “cover” is made from glass but has different textures as well as transparencies. One is completely smooth and transparent, while another is smooth yet frosted. Perhaps the curious one is the ribbed clear glass that adds an interesting play of light with its reflections and refraction.

While the Odd Pot retains pretty much the exact same function of a regular planter, its form takes the presentation to the next level. With its stumps for legs and an “arm” that extends from its body, it almost looks like an anthropomorphic version of a planter. It might even remind some of the “sus” characters from a popular game from the past year or two. Granted, the pot’s design isn’t going to be conducive to all kinds of plants, particularly the ones that grow tall or wide. But for most succulents, it will do just fine and will even add a bit of character to your plant decoration.

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Wild Stool Invites nature into your space to make you feel relaxed

Nature helps us feel relaxed and calm. We enjoy being immersed in nature and taking in Mother Earth’s beauty. For most of us, however, living in the wild is not a realistic option, but we can find a creative way to live with nature. The most common and simplest way to incorporate the natural world into our daily lives is to bring plants into our space. Having indoor plants not only improves the overall appearance of a room but also boosts moods, increases creativity, and reduces stress, especially when presented in a unique and interesting way.

Designer: Jorge Herrera Studio

Keeping your plants alive and healthy can be challenging for some people, including myself. Nurturing your plants can be demanding of time and an endless chore. You have to water them regularly, maintain the soil moisture at the correct range, keep them at the ideal temperature, and provide an adequate amount of sunlight.

If you wish to have house plants but do not have confidence in your botany skills to keep them alive, you are not out of luck. Wild Stool can be the answer that comes in the most unconventional manner. The collaboration between Spanish designer Jorge Herrera and Greenarea, a Spanish company that specializes in plant decoration, created a biophilic design with plant stabilization technology to deliver Wild Stool. A cylinder-shaped low stool with a transparent base that encapsulates a miniature natural landscape, Wild Stool brings nature into interior spaces with no maintenance needed. Now you can enjoy a bit of nature indoors without all the hassle.

Specimens placed inside the stool are treated with a conservation technique called stabilization, which replaces the natural spa of plants with preservatives. Stabilized plants and flowers retain their structure and natural freshness while eliminating the need for water, sunlight, soil, or fertilizer. The miniature landscape can be customized with mosses, lichens, branches, and flowers. Natural objects such as rocks and sea shells can also be added to create a terrain that provides you with a sense of comfort, tranquility, and inspiration.

Equipped with a natural wooden base, Wild Stool is available in three different seat options – birch, oak, or upholstered seat in sustainable Gabriel fabric for added comfort. The minimalistic design draws attention to the little garden inside the stool and also lets the seat blend seamlessly with existing furniture in your living space. Simple yet unexpected, this terrarium-turned-stool enlivens the space with wonders of the wilderness and gives you a comfortable seat as well.

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Cork-based home goods strike the perfect balance between practicality and sustainability

Mind the Cork is a line of cork-based home goods, ranging from hanging planters to cylindrical storage vessels.

Cork is one of the planet’s most sustainable materials. Every decade, the heavy bark can be stripped off from the cork oak tree through a skilled trade that’s passed down over generations. Once the cork is harvested, the biodegradable material can be used for an array of different purposes.

Designer: Mind the Cork

London-based studio Mind the Cork found one purpose in using cork to produce home goods. The designers behind Mind the Cork produce cork pieces like planters, dishware, and storage containers to create a line of practical home goods rooted in sustainability.

Mind the Cork founder Jenny Espirito Santo initially produced the line of cork goods as her passion project, but its eco-concious and minimalist appeal soon took off. Weaving together the environmental aspect with the current home trend toward green spaces, Santo produced a collection of different planters of varying sizes and shapes.

From hanging to stationery planters, Mind the Cork carries small to medium-sized planters and even features maintenance and care instructions so the cork lasts. Besides planters, Santo works closely with craftspeople and small factories in the UK and Portugal to create cardholders, cork bowls, and cylindrical storage containers with 11 lid options.

Providing safe nesting grounds and a healthy ecosystem, cork oak tree plots are never damaged during the process of cork harvesting. Primarily taking place in Portugal, Santo harvests the cork by peeling the excess bark from cork oak trees, which in turn prompts each tree to begin a regenerative process to grow more bark. With an average lifespan between 170 to 250 years, cork oak trees are first harvested after they reach 25 years. From there, the cork can be stripped from the tree’s bark every ten years.

In addition to desk planters, Mind the Cork carries hanging planters that are lightweight and sustainable.

Cork dishes and bowls provide a soft landing spot for jewelry and other delicate items.

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This furniture collection also doubles up as pot planters with an ultimate Japandi vibe!

After spending 99% of my time at home in the last two years, I have naturally developed a keen eye for good furniture designs. My preferred style is Japandi or Scandanavian design because I love their minimal aesthetic, functionality, and evergreen pieces – all of which I see in Lur! It is a furniture collection that includes pot planters which also double up as seating in the most organic manner. It was designed for Alki, a brand that is always seeking to collaborate with local businesses which makes it even more special because it unites distinct know-how and materials.

To create the Lur collection, designer Iratzoki Lizaso went to Goicoechea Pottery and work with the local team. The pottery workshop is based in Ortzaize in Lower Navarre, just a few kilometers from Alki. The Goicoechea family has been working with terracotta for three generations. The materials used, the solid oak, and the clay from the Goicoechea family quarry are here entirely natural.

The collection consists of planters and a bistro table. They all have smooth curves and organic shapes featuring a warm aesthetic thanks to the choice of materials and CMF details. It is minimal, timeless, and can work equally well for homes, offices, and public spaces. The idea of ​​being able to vegetate our interiors with pots that are also low tables or seating participates in the creation of living and changing arrangements. These terracotta containers with an eccentric hole on the upper part, house flower pots that allow many unique and artistic compositions that can change the look and feel of a space!

Alki, the pottery team, and Iratzoki Lizaso enjoyed bringing together different craft skills to create Lur. The collection is centered around the idea of plant pots that can work double duty as shelves and coffee tables that add an extra dose of greenery to our spaces. Everything is bio-sourced and made with the intention to work universally as well as for a long time. The clay is transformed into a beautiful rose terracotta with a distinct texture with an off-center opening ready to hold flower pots and plants. The Lur range shows beauty in simplicity while doubling the functionality with minimal design!

Desinger: Iratzoki Lizaso

Ultimate must-have products for plant lovers to add some green + peace to your living space!

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. I, for one, am a major plant lover, and absolutely love adding plants to my home space. I love growing and tending to them. It’s almost therapeutic for me. I’m sure there are quite a few other plant lovers out there like me, and this collection of product designs is especially for them! From a flexible vase that expands as your plants grow to an indoor planter that also functions as a lamp, each of these products will bring a little green to your home, or help you take better care of your precious plants. These are a must-have for all plant lovers!

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 by Ben Hansen, this simple yet innovative dog house uses excess water from watering plants and filters it into the dog’s water bowl! Rattan with green accents gives it a light, airy feel. The minimal dog house will brighten any corner of your home – hard not to when it holds a cute plant and pet! It’s an adorable piece of furniture that not only serves as a home for your pet but also doubles up as an elegant plant holder, harmoniously merging with the interiors of your home. Ben’s approach to this is almost reversal to the way we treat our pets and plants. While we love the use of rattan and wish to promote this sustainable material, there is also a certain lightness to the material which needs to be balanced by a strong and heavy metal frame to keep your energetic puppy from toppling this over!

Repotting plants as they grow bigger is a headache. You need to be incredibly gentle to avoid damaging the root system, and once you introduce a plant into a new, bigger pot, you need to hope and pray that the plant adapts to that shift. Repotting plants is a painstaking (and frankly messy task), although Lidia Gómez has a pretty clever solution. The FlexVase by Gómez is an expandable vase made from hard silicone. It uses an accordion-shaped profile to expand vertically in size, allowing you to simply stretch the planter as the plant inside it grows. As the planter expands in size, it creates more space for the roots to grow, as well as breaks the soil up, aerating it so the roots get more oxygen.

I love plants, but to be quite frank, I suffer from the watering-memory-loss syndrome. That’s medical speak for “I can never remember when I watered them last”, and that means I either end up over or under-watering them. Needless to say, they die most of the time. The Forget Me Not planter, however, was built to easily overcome that problem. With a two-part design featuring a planter-pot and base tray, the Forget Me Not planter lets you mark a date on it, reminding you of when you watered it last. The planter’s base comes with numbers engraved on it, while the underlying tray features a single notch, letting you see the date through it quite like a date window on a watch. When you water a plant, set the date on its base and it acts as a physical reminder to tell you when it was watered last.

Ukrainian product designer Julia Kononenko created the ‘Eco Pot’, an intriguing little product that organizes your desk and adds a pop of green to it! The multipurpose desk accessory is basically a flower pot with an integrated pen holder. Divided into two sections, the smaller square-shaped section has been reserved to store your pens and pencils. Whereas the elevated larger section functions as a planter. Add a succulent or two and watch your desk bloom! Crafted from elmwood, Eco Pot is also lined with glass vessels, to ensure that neither the water nor soil damage the wood structure. The glass cover also helps to keep your desk dust-free even if the plants haven’t been planted.

This is the GreenVita indoor planter which brings tenfold the greenery into your home – you can grow indoor plants or veggies in this exquisitely designed accessory that also functions as a lamp to give your space the right amount of ambiance. Place it by your desk or in the open lounge space alongside your aquarium, and you’ll feel that sense of calm when you finally retreat to comforting rest. The grow-light of GreenVita makes sure the plants and veggies get the needed light spectrum to bloom in all seasons. It’s been designed to easily water the plants by pulling out the tray at two-level which can be loaded with different plants on one level and the veggies on another.

Imagine dandelions dancing in the breeze in a lush meadow, their spores fluttering and flying about. This was the inspiration for Beom sic Jeon and Kim Hyunsoec’s Blow humidifier. You operate the humidifier as you would water and nurture your plants. Blow comprises a water bowl, forming the lower portion of the humidifier. It is transparent, allowing you to view the internal components of Blow. Whereas the upper portion is reminiscent of a long dandelion with its seed head at the top, full of spores. You pour water into the little bucket as if you were watering your potted plants. The lower portion of the humidifier functions like the roots of a plant, absorbing the water in the bowl. The water is then released as steam, from the opening or the seed head on the top.

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.

Designed to give you the best of two incredibly capable worlds, the Aria is a nifty hybrid purifier that uses NASA-inspired purification technology along with the world’s oldest and most effective purification system – nature. Styled as a vertical planter, the Aria functions almost like a chimney, pulling air from the bottom and passing it through multiple filters, a UV chamber, and finally through the soil of a plant that uses phytoremediation to destroy any toxins and contaminants. The result? Purified air, obviously, but also an appliance that’s advanced enough to keep you healthy yet aesthetic enough to fit beautifully into your home’s decor.

We know abundant sunlight is essential to assist the healthy growth of indoor plants. However, the key to successful gardening is to know which type of plant requires how much light to thrive, and what part of the house has that kind of sunlight. Or maybe you can introduce the LUMISO to your home, which comes with grow lights that offer an exclusive light spectrum giving your plants the right amount of solar and ultraviolet rays they need to thrive. Thankfully also, the LUMISO is not a mundane planter. It can sit beautifully on the desk and function as a table lamp as well as emitting cool and warm light that replicates the natural solar spectrum. The flower pot and lamp has a button in the base which is used to turn on the grow-light and it comes with replaceable blubs so they can be easily replaced at the end of life.

Created by designer Ekaterina Shchetina, Fluidity serves a double function. A comely white dish rack by day, the multipurpose dish rack has an alter ego; it serves as a planter, or to be precise there are two built-in planters on its sides. Fluidity is designed in such a way that the run-off water from the freshly washed dishes trickles down to the roots of the plants, irrigating and nourishing them. The base, thanks to its fluid form, allows the water to be directed to the plant containers. Perforated at the bottom, the containers are filled with clay pellets and coconut fiber, to control the water environment of the plants and to keep the drainer base free from water residue.

This clay humidifier, filter, lamp and planter is inspired from sustainable Brazilian traditions!

Clay filters are common in Brazilian homes and designer Lucas Couto brings the best of them to more household appliances. Clay is an organic and natural material used by many developing nations because it is cost-effective, versatile, and easily available. Terracotta earthenware in the kitchen is an ingenious practice that is finding its way back into our modern lives and Couto extends the benefits of this material to lamps, filters, and humidifiers.

“I intended to respect the heritage, avoiding an approach to simply “modernize” the filter. I wanted to create a unique form factor that takes advantage of the materials and manufacturing process while introducing new functional features, such as a handle to assist in lifting the upper reservoir and a base to support a drinking glass,” he adds, “The cooling property of the ceramic inspired me to design a humidifier. This is a much-needed item in my hometown of Belo Horizonte, where the air can get very dry throughout the year.” Clay filters are actually proven to eliminate toxins from water through its existing properties while also keeping it cool according to research published in the book The Drinking Water Book: How to Eliminate Harmful Toxins from Your Water. The efficient filtration is a result of the gravity process, where water passes through the candles and drips slowly into the lower reservoir.

Couto wanted to create a multi-sensorial experience fostered by the terracotta. He retained the color, the textures, and the gradient caused by water absorption for visuals and touch. The water drops inside the filter and the vitrified sound of the material produce a soothing sound. Terracotta naturally smells like earth after rain and it also adds a unique flavor to water. The cooling property of the ceramic is why Couto made the humidifier too. All components are placed in the lid, which also contains a level indicator to assist the user with keeping the humidifier filled. The lamp and the planter were additions to the series to showcase the material in various forms outside the kitchen use. The planter has a two-compartment design to take advantage of capillarity for petrichor! The inner part of the pendant lamp is covered with a white glaze to increase light reflection while the terracotta prevents it from overheating. The clay range is organic, warm, functional, and aesthetic!

Designer: Lucas Couto

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Pac-Man and Ghost Planters Gobble Up Dirt and Power Pills

If you’re trying to grow plants, you’ll need seeds, dirt, water, and sunlight if you hope to keep them alive. But did you know that plants grow extra strong when you feed them power pills? At least that’s what Pac-Man told me. Or maybe I’m just starting to hear things after being quarantined at home too long. Either way, this Pac-Man and Ghost planter set looks like a fun way to grow house plants.

Manchester, UK outfit RetroGamingCentre makes these colorful 3D-printed plastic planters inspired by Namco’s classic 8-bit arcade game. The set includes a Pac-Man planter, along with Blinky, Pinky, and Clyde pots. Apparently, Inky is as bashful as they said he was on the title screen of the game, and didn’t show up for the garden party. The set comes with a matching blue tray, decorated with white pellets around its edge. Clearly, Pac-Man hasn’t found any power pills yet, because none of the ghosts have turned blue.

The set is available over on Etsy, with prices ranging from about $50 up to $118, depending on the size you go with (6cm or 10cm) and if you want the tray. If Pac-Man isn’t your thing, they also make a Super Mario planter set, a couple of Pokémon planter sets, and also individual planters so you can mix and match.

Multifunctional planter designs that combine your love of plants with the modern millennial lifestyle!

Having plants in your home can really have a therapeutic and relaxing effect on you. It can create a sense of serenity and peace in your home, helping you feel at ease with your surroundings. As much as I love plants by themselves, designs that integrate plants into them, and also cater to my lifestyle needs are an added bonus! These product designs add a touch of green to our homes, all the while providing immense functionality and usability in our day-to-day lives. This collection of planter products range from an air purifier that doubles up as a planter, to a coffee table with a hidden miniature garden! Not only do they meet our ‘green’ requirements, but also the requirements of our home. I would love to incorporate these designs into my own home!

The Eva hydroponic fixture offers neglectful plant owners a no-effort solution in which the plant cares for itself – by merging an indoor garden with an aquarium! The Eva planter creates an environment in which the plants can survive without human help. How? By creating a symbiotic relationship between the fish and fauna that live inside it. The fishes produce ammonia as a waste product, which can become toxic in large amounts. As it happens, ammonia contains nitrogen, which is necessary for photosynthesis and helps with plant growth. In the garden above, the roots break down the ammonia, and the resulting waste product, nitrites, then become food for the fish. Simply put, it’s the circle of life — with only two organisms. Additionally, Eva includes light fixtures that mimic natural sunlight. This is not a new feature — we’ve seen it on similar planters — but it contributes to Eva’s mission: to sustain life in any indoor environment. It allows everyone to flex their green thumbs, even if their living spaces seem less than ideal for plant life.

The Briiv is a household terrarium, but more importantly, it’s a fresh take on air-filtration that ditches those HEPA filters and UV lights for something more natural. With the design that looks like a cross between a terrarium and an Apple Homepod, the Briiv is a modern-looking air purifier that adds a touch of green to your apartment. The filter comes with a special, sustainably-grown, dried moss on the inside that naturally purifies the air by trapping harmful particles, killing microorganisms, and releasing clean, fresh air. Sitting underneath the moss are multiple bio-filters, including one made from loosely woven coconut fibers, another filter comprising carbon-infused hemp, and a woolen microfiber filter that together combines to filter particles as small as PM 0.3 while also trapping and neutralizing bacteria, molds, and other volatile organic compounds to give you air that’s been freshened naturally, in a filter that’s designed to be the equivalent of as many as 3000 house plants in one device.

Providing a lovely dim light to your space as well as photons for a tiny kitchen-garden, the Brot is a lamp and planter combined into one slick, terracotta package. The lamp provides nourishment to a tiny kitchen-garden that you can literally pick from and use in your meals. The upper half of the Brot lamp houses the light, while the lower half acts as a torus-shaped vessel for growing plants. A stainless steel tray sits inside the lower half, acting as a holder for the plant. You can sow a variety of seeds in the Brot, and the process is pretty standard. The seeds need to be soaked in advance before being planted, and can then be placed in the Brot’s lower half. They need to be moistened (probably using a spray/spritzer) 2-3 times a day, and within a week you’ve got yourself a perfectly healthy, homegrown set of herbs or sprouts to use in your meals. Oh, and let’s not forget, the Brot can be used for ambient dim lighting too, because after all, it’s also a lamp!

SOLE, a home gardening system, poses first as a small coffee table only to reveal a hidden, self-maintained, miniature garden for city dwellers who want to fill their homes up with some natural greens, but not the fuss that typically comes with them. Thankfully, SOLE’s coffee table was designed to take up as little space as possible in order to fit into even the smallest of studios. Indoor urban gardening is usually practiced by using grow box containers that require a lot of window ledge space and natural sunlight – both of which can be hard to come by in city apartment searches. In order to make home gardening possible in any city-living space, SOLE maintains the perfect climate, temperature, and nutrients for you and your chosen plants so long as they fit inside the coffee table’s extensive body.

You love plants, plants love light, you love light, you’ll both love the Mygdal plantlight! It’s a revolutionary lighting solution not just because the luminaire is a completely self-sustaining ecosystem where the plants can grow undisturbed, but also because of its one-of-a-kind electrically conductive glass coating. It actually streams the electricity invisibly along the surface, so there’s no need for a cable connection between the power source and the LED. Bring even windowless spaces to life with a plantlight! The world’s easiest and most fascinating way of indoor greenery. They not only light up the dark but also bring nature indoors – even into spaces without any daylight. Thanks to their patent-pending SmartGrow technology, the plants do not require any care.

Designed by Ben Hansen, this simple yet innovative dog house uses excess water from watering plants and filters it into the dog’s water bowl! Rattan with green accents gives it a light, airy feel. The minimal dog house will brighten any corner of your home – hard not to when it holds a cute plant and pet! It’s an adorable piece of furniture that not only serves as a home for your pet but also doubles up as an elegant plant holder, harmoniously merging with the interiors of your home.

There’s nothing we love more than everyday lifestyle items with a twist! And if we get to save some water along the way, and grow a few greens… well, Milan-based DesignLibero’s ‘Fluidity’ allows us to do just that! Created by designer Ekaterina Shchetina, Fluidity serves a double function. A comely white dish rack by day, the multipurpose dish rack has an alter ego; it serves as a planter, or to be precise there are two built-in planters on its sides. Fluidity is designed in such a way that the run-off water from the freshly washed dishes trickles down to the roots of the plants, irrigating and nourishing them. The base, thanks to its fluid form, allows the water to be directed to the plant containers. Perforated at the bottom, the containers are filled with clay pellets and coconut fiber, to control the water environment of the plants and to keep the drainer base free from water residue.

Dubbed “Grow”, this is a hydroponic system for nurturing plants, herbs, and more utilizing water from dishwashers, washing machines, and toilets. The designer’s motive behind such a design is to offer indoor gardeners a more conscious way to water their greens. While using gray water for watering indoor plants sounds like a perfect idea, the initial information about the Grow proves a different scenario. From how it’s presented; when the water is flushed, freshwater flowing into the tank is first pulled by the planter system for irrigation and then it returns to the flush. This outrightly suggests that the Grow is not basically using graywater, instead, its utilizing freshwater for its needs. This may work beyond the idea of a worthy planter for the environmentally friendly; it for an instance sticks with us for the convenience of watering it offers. How the system checks the situation of overwatering or other tad bits of gardening, is something that still needs to come to light. Nonetheless, Grow does gives the notion of bringing nature into the home a new dimension!

Designed by Nguyen La Chanh of Nection Design, The Moss Carpet looks at getting the grass to your feet, and that too in your bathroom! Made from imputrescible foam called plastazote, the mat includes ball moss, island moss, and forest moss. The humidity of the bathroom ensures that the mosses thrive. And that’s why you need to place it there and not anywhere else. Little gnomes not included.

There’s nothing that will bring a little life (literally) to your dwelling faster than a plant or two (or three, or four, or fifty!). However, not everyone is a fan of standalone planters and pots cluttering up their living quarters. The latest from Pentagon Design, the Kekkila Garden Series of home furnishings aims to provide plenty of room for all your favorite plants. The designs, which consist of shelving, boxes, ladders, and more, feature integrated containers and surfaces that make perfect homes for plants next to your books and other belongings. They take up the same size footprint that your standard furniture would occupy, only they give your space freshness and a natural component you can enjoy. Some units also contain built-in lighting to help plants grow indoors while providing illumination and ambiance to your room. Use them inside or out and put your green thumb to practice!

These automotive designs doubling up as planters are the surreal future in an after-pandemic new normal

COVID-19 totally shook up our world, it obliterated life as we know it, forcing us to rethink our way of living. Life in a pandemic is a unique adventure (let’s be positive) that unfolds new lessons and experiences every day, life after pandemic? – I wonder what that will be like. Designer Nicolas Abdelkader envisions what the post-pandemic world could be like, and he has proposed an innovative project for it – “The Urgency To Slow Down”. The Urgency To Slow Down is basically a collection of photos featuring “augmented planters”, wherein our means of transportation such as planes, ships, cars and etc double up as planters, and are able to hold trees, plants, shrubs, and basically greenery of any sort! He imagines a world wherein walking and bicycles are our preferred means for traveling from one location to another, and in such a world these Automotives are rendered useless! Hence, he aimed to transform these pollution-creating objects into designs that would benefit the environment. For example, the above-showcased image is probably one of my favorite renderings from the collection, where Nicolas created an airplane with beautiful gardens growing and rising from open fuselages. This collection of digitally-edited photos is his personal plea to slow down energy consumption, and his vision for the new world that we could create once this pandemic ends – a world that is healthy, green, and well taken care of, and a world that only we can build with our conscious efforts and precautions!

In Nicholas’ vision for the future, these fossil-fuel consuming machines become unused (as moving vehicles), and in fact function as augmented planters, as little havens of greenery and nature!

Almost everyone uses cabs, they’re an easy and convenient form of transportation, and of course a major contributor to air pollution. However, in Abdelkader’s imagined post-pandemic world, cabs are now obsolete. So, he placed green shrubs and bushes with delicate little flowers growing from them, on the roof and at the front of the cab.

Motorbikes and scooters are no exception to Abdelkader’s predicted fate for automotives. He designed a motorbike with little plants and a flower bush, right in between the seating section and the handles.

Personal cars are another major source of air pollution. However, hopefully, in the future, we will prefer our own personal feet for moving from one place to another! And for such a scenario, Abdelkader designed a very green car. The roof and front section of the car are adorned with a mini garden complete with some pretty flowers!

Military tanks, trucks, or any other army issued vehicles can be included in this project as well. The designer added some mini trees, sunflower plants, and other shrubs to the already brown and green machines!

Abdelkader has taken into consideration all means of transport, whether it’s air, land…or even water! Shrubs and plants sprouting from this imposing container ship is surely a jaw-dropping sight!

Abdelkader integrated tall trees into the backside of trucks, transforming these intimidating pollution-causing monsters into sweet miniature gardens!

Okay, hats off to Abdelkader, because this photo is pretty innovative and unique! He created a SpaceX rocket with little trees and grass erupting from it. Because, apparently I guess space travel is off the list as well, in the new post-pandemic world!