Here is a look that should do well in America: Stockholm designer Katarina Hall designs "Save"- furniture inspired by abandoned houses and boarded up doors and windows. ...
TreeHugger first showed YOLO Colorhouse paints
over three years ago and their
outdoor line a year ago. It's nice stuff, but now every paint manufacturer offers VOC (volatile organic compound) free paint, it is an easy point when you are racking them up for LEED. (Learn
why VOC free is important here)
So besides the lovely booth with happy people creating spin art, what makes YOLO so special today?
...
Casa Decor, the international interior design show, chose “Pathway to a Sustainable Environment” (or Rumbo Sostenible in Spanish) as this year’s theme for their exhibition in Barcelona. We already wrote about
the elegant recycled restaurant by designer Nancy Robbins in a previous article, and we would now like to present you the project
Barcelona Forever, by designer Mette Bak Andersen. It is a more poetic recycling project, getting people to think about obsolescence and re-use.
(More images after the jump)...
Pistachio’s flagship Yonge & Eglinton location in Toronto. Photo courtesy of Pistachio.
Looking for
beeswax crayons for the kids? Or perhaps you’re in need of unique note cards printed on recycled paper with
soy ink? If your dream store carries nothing but chic, eco-friendly products, you’ll be nuts for
Pistachio, a new retail store that opened in Toronto last month.
The shop with a conscience envisioned by Heather Reisman – the woman behind the
Indigo Books empire (which, incidentally, has a rather impressive
environmental policy for a bookstore) – goes the extra mile in greening lifestyle retail. But it all started, as the company’s
mission statement reveals, with a simple idea, “being generous, environmentally sensitive and engaged with life is good for us and good for the planet.”...
In our previous article about
Casa Decor, the international interior design show taking place this month in Barcelona, we weren’t sure they stuck to their self-implied title
Pathway to a Sustainable Environment (or “Rumbo Sostenible” in Spanish). However, amongst the non-convincing projects and confusing messages, the design of the restaurant makes a refreshing difference. Designed by Barcelona-based
Nancy Robbins Design Studio, we’d like to invite you to take a closer look at a precious piece of recycled interior design. Read on to see more images....
Charles Jencks called it
Adhocism: "the art of living and doing things ad hoc- using materials at hand, rather than waiting for the perfect moment or "proper" approach. As a principle of design, it begins with everyday improvisations, such as bottles for candle holders and tractor seats on wheels for dining chairs."
Designers are still doing it, but now it's called recycling.
Studio Jo Meesters created TESTLAB, "an experimental ongoing project about rejuvenating and reusing discarded materials." The furniture shown above is entirely made out of 34 discarded wooden beams and 16 leftover blankets....
We were delighted when
Casa Decor, one of the leading interior design shows taking place in cities like London, Miami, Milan, Madrid or Lisbon, chose sustainability as this year’s theme for the Barcelona edition. After more than 38 exhibitions all around the world, presenting the latest in interior design, decoration and art, the Barcelona team has made an effort to motivate this year’s exhibiting designers to go green, under the slogan
Pathway to a Sustainable Environment or
Rumbo Sostenible in Spanish. But have they managed we wonder?
Each year Casa Decor chooses a different location, normally an unoccupied and run down site, and transforms it for a month into an exhibition where 60 decorators, designers and landscape artists show their work. This year in Barcelona they picked some 5.000 m2 at the Port Fòrum Sant Adrià, an amazing space that belongs to the new port near
Barcelona’s massive solar panel by the sea. We visited and found a few attractive spaces that took the sustainability issue seriously, but we found more empty words and confusing messages, that were quite upsetting and boarded on
greenwashing. Certainly nowadays, designers can do better than to fit a few energy efficient light bulbs into a space and call it green. ...
Japan Industrial Design Promotion Organization is a venerable old institution that has slowly realized the value of "eco" in design. Their
Good Design Award has developed into a comprehensive design evaluation system that centers on industrial products but includes products in a wide variety of fields such as the environment. I liked this years' winner: the
A-Wall, made by
Awagami Factory in Tokushima: a wallpaper made based on paper-making techniques and traditions that are at least 1300 years old....
photo/A+R
With retail sales down and expected to continue plummeting, will buyers eschew green products in favor of less-expensive fare? Not if retailers expand their definition of “eco-friendly,” said Andy Griffith, one-half of the team behind the wildly popular A + R stores in Los Angeles, CA.
From an MP3 player from sustainable hardwood to vintage fabric stuffed animals: Find out more about the green gifts Griffith is betting on this season.
...
Photo courtesy of MoMa
Sure,
theaters were getting greener on their own, thanks to the efforts of some progressive proprietors and forward thinking
designers. But now there’s an entire initiative looking to sweep Broadway with unifying green policies. It’s the
Green Theatre Initiative, and it just launched its comprehensive website last week. So what’s its impact?...
Kelly LaPlante's eco-friendly DIFFA installation/photo by Natalie Sojka
The design industry is not typically known for its desire to reduce, reuse and recycle. Clients who can actually afford interior designers to “do” their homes have a reputation for an “out with the old, in with the new” mentality that keeps these designers in business.
Read on to find out how sustainably-minded designer Kelly La Plante’s latest show installation took that mentality and turned it on its ear…...
Photo: courtesy Richard Byrd
Got three million and change? Get in line. The hottest eco-friendly home on the market is a $3.5 million,
LEED Platinum, 1920s Spanish stunner recently renovated by Adrian Grenier’s go-to green expert Richard Byrd of “
Alter Eco” fame. The guy may be brand new in the eco-development department, but in this, his first sustainable home, he hits all the marks. Think
reclaimed materials like 300-year-old Spanish roof tile,
CFL bulbs,
solar trees, low-flow sinks and toilets, and a carpet made entirely from
post-consumer waste recycled plastic water bottles. (Check out more pics after the jump!) And that's not all...
...
Paul Smith's "Swirl" design for The Rug Company.
Earlier this summer
The Rug Company, known for it's very glamorous designer rugs, announced that it has joined up with the ethical trading label
RugMark. The Rug Company, based in London, New York and Los Angeles, is well known for it's collaborations with high profile fashion designers such as Vivienne Westwood, Diane Von Furstenburg and Paul Smith (pictured above). Owners Christopher and Suzanne Sharp have been successfully marketing the concept of rugs as key interior design features, rather than just floor coverings, for many years now and we're very happy to see that whilst continuing to push design boundaries they are also concerned about how, where and by whom their rugs are produced. ...
In this era where
clunkers may be collected and
SUVs may go straight off lease to the scrap yards, Furniture designers and manufacturers Nine Stories may be on to something: they make furniture out of car panels. "we are exploring the vast landscape of the american salvage yard to collect textures and colors that ony years of sun and rain can create."
Terrific slide show of how they work below the fold....
Interface sells carpet to the tune of $1,100,000,000 each year. That is just one reason why the business world listens up when Ray Anderson speaks. Ray describes his ecological awakening as “a spear in the chest,” a wound he has used to both his company’s advantage, and the planet’s. Giving rebirth to 133 million pounds of carpet is just the beginning. Anderson and his design teams are hard at work studying nature’s delicate technologies—like the sticky feet of geckos—to make products better, cleaner, and more beautiful. Here, the founder of Interface shares his insights on biomimicry, right-brain thinking, cradle-to-cradle design, and our innate “biophilia.” ::
TreeHugger Radio
Listen to the podcast of this interview via
iTunes, or just click
here to listen, right-click to download.
Special thanks go to
CraigMichaels, the organizer of the Sustainable Operations Summit, for arranging this interview.
Also, check out
part one of our Ray Anderson interview.
(Full text after the jump)...
Ray Anderson started his company,
Interface, back in the 1970s to make carpet. Like any business man, he wanted to shake up the market and make a healthy profit, which he’s done, and Interface now has 17 manufacturing locations on four continents. But this is not business as usual. Not anymore. Since having a sustainability epiphany, as he calls it, Ray has starting steering Interface toward one hell of a goal: zero negative effects on the planetary ecosystem by the year 2020, a goal he admits no corporation has yet reached. TreeHugger has long found inspiration in Interface’s elegant design solutions—products like
modular carpet and
FLOR—and in Anderson’s own
sagely words. ::
TreeHugger Radio
Listen to the podcast of this interview via
iTunes, or just click
here to listen, right-click to download. For Part Two of this interview,
click here.
Special thanks go to
CraigMichaels, the organizer of the Sustainable Operations Summit, for arranging this interview.
(Full text after the jump)...
Inhabitat's BRA-Braille wall tiles are molded bamboo paper pulp.
OK, fun facts. Portland and Seattle always seem to take the awards for most LEED-certified green buildings per capita. But dinky little Durham, North Carolina with a population just over 200,000 has the most LEED buildings in the state and ranks in the top five nationally on a per capita basis.
Durham, home to Duke University, has a plan to revitalize its city center using green building techniques. Duke has designed all of its buildings and renovations in the last 5 years to meet LEED standards - it just got its
first platinum at a residence hall, and Durham County requires municipal buildings to get LEED certification. For a smallish town, there's a lot going on, and local contractor
Trinity Design Build is one business trying to corner the market on green renovation, both on residential and small office sites, and green historic remodels. They've work they've done on their own remodel and in adjacent leased space are a great reminder that green remodels can be as cool or cooler than green new builds. Via
::Inhabitat and
::209 North Gregson
North Carolina Green Building
Greenbridge Developments: Bringing LEED Gold To North Carolina...
J.R. Watkins’ new line of natural home care products brings the fresh-scented carefully crafted quality of their natural body care line to your spring cleaning routine. You might be wondering: “A body-care line that also makes natural home cleansers?” But once you think over it a bit – the concept makes perfect sense.
Both types of products are coming under greater scrutiny as we learn about the risks we take by applying toxic ingredients to our skin and using caustic chemicals to clean our homes. For too long we’ve made a Faustian bargain with the products we use in our personal and home care – accepting that to be effective they must also be a bit (or a lot) dangerous....
looolo cushions are designed to dizzolve
Penelope Green in The New York Times looks at "ready to rot" furniture, made of "wood frames from sustainably managed forests, uncoated nails, organic fabrics and stuffings, nontoxic dyes and, something extra: biodegradability. “At first the whole idea was to have as little impact on the environment as possible,” said Tim Zyto, chief executive of
Montauk. “And then I started to think, wouldn’t it be great to have no impact? Then it was, hey, what if the sofa just disappears when you’re done with it?”
The principles espoused by William McDonough and Michael Braungart in
Cradle to Cradle are being applied to household goods, which can be either upcycled or composted. Even
Umbra, home of so many Designs by Mr. Plastic Fantastic Karim Rashid, is now making them out of PLA (corn based plastic) so that they will biodegrade.
Others think that this is the wrong approach.
...
We'll be working on better category archives soon. In the meantime, take a look at the
if you really want to dig around, or use the search box at the top of the page.
on 05.11.09
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