Words Mark Hooper Photography Chris Webb

Published in No 14

Alice and Gavin Munro are furniture makers with a difference. For a start, they don’t make their furniture — they grow it. Using willow and other mainly UK native hedgerow species, the couple have grown lamps, chandeliers, tables and chairs by shaping them from trees for periods of up to a decade, using a process similar to coppicing. It’s a painstaking process, fraught with uncertainty and the vagaries of nature, which only makes it more fascinating.

After experiments with various designs, the couple are currently concentrating on chairs, which are grown in rows, like a vineyard seen through Lewis Carroll’s looking glass. The cultivation process involves several stages — first cutting the trees back to encourage new growth, which is shaped around frames and grafted before being cut down and (usually) left to dry out ready for finishing — then planing the wood back to provide a better sitting surface and reveal more of its character.

“It sounds so simple when we say it like that!” laughs Alice.

“And before you even start doing anything, you’ve got to plant the tree and leave it for five years,” adds Gavin. “Almost everything we do is using prehistoric techniques. We use coppiced small trees, so then you can use them again. And growing a chair on them is almost like an extreme haircut.”

It’s fair to say that their manufacturing company, Full Grown, is a slow-burn project, which requires almost superhuman levels of patience. “It’s a thousand-year plan we’re working on here, and we’re a decade and a half into it,” says Gavin, who points out that the learning process has proven just as torturous for them as the manufacture.

“Each species is different, and we’re just discovering each one’s idiosyncrasies really,” continues Alice. “We write a rule and think that’s definitely true, and then the next species will say, ‘Oh no, I’m not doing that!’ Or even the tree next door of the same species. So, we don’t yet absolutely understand what we don’t understand!”

But let’s rewind a little and ask a few fundamentals. Firstly: Why?

Gavin traces his interest back to a childhood spent in and out of hospitals due to a spinal condition — “One of the hospitals I was in was built into woodland, so from my hospital bed I could look out into these woods, with bird feeders everywhere, watching the natural world go by for months in a row. It was the combination of that and the fact of how awesomely kind, competent and considerate the whole hospital staff were. I didn’t know what I wanted to do in the future, but to some degree I wanted to emulate that.”

Whilst studying art and design at university, Gavin honed in on wood as a material, marveling at its versatility — especially as he became more interested in “cradle to cradle” sustainability in manufacture. “You look at absolutely everything around you, all the objects, the ways we do things, and it doesn’t take too long to realize that humans are crazy. We do all these absolutely bonkers things!”

A period living in California, making furniture from driftwood, helped him to develop the idea of letting nature shape the design still further. The couple are at pains to point out they’re not the first to have hit on this notion. “I knew of other people growing stools, a few in Australia shaping trees into chairs. And there was this moment of realizing — we could turn this into a repeatable system where we could make usable objects by shaping the tree into the form that you want and then harvesting it. And then you have a kind of natural factory, where you don’t have to do any of the awful stuff like logging and the rest of it, in order to have an object. And I thought how hard can that be to make a project out of it?”

At this, the couple dissolve into nervous laughter. It’s a brave step making the leap from having such a revolutionary idea and putting it into action, I suggest…

“Well yeah,” Gavin demurs. “I think the word brave can often be replaced with the word stupid!”

“Or foolhardy?” suggests Alice.

“Foolhardy, yes! I am a fool. But you only have one life, what are you going to do with it? And to be honest, it’s just too beautiful not to do. And beautiful in all aspects of it — admiring the potential efficiency of it as well. There’s a Roman architect called Vitruvius who said you know the thing you’ve made is good if it is solid, useful and beautiful. And as a technique, it has the potential to create objects that are solid, useful and beautiful. It’s a technique that could create a chair that is one solid piece. There are no joints to come loose. This whole idea of how we’re slowly coming round to buying fewer, better things: it’s an ideal way to create and heirloom.”

Of course, the one downside of letting nature have its head is it does tend to ignore the best laid plans of humans. “Yes! That’s the understatement of the decade!” says Gavin, laughing again. “And it’s going to be a few decades of doing this before anything has any degree of predictability about it. One of the things that’s simultaneously frustrating and deeply interesting about it is the way we’re approaching it, no-one’s done it like this before, so nobody knows how the trees will react.”

“It is difficult because people do want things instantly these days, and not everyone can quite understand that we can’t just make it grow more quickly!” adds Alice. “And making something grow more quickly isn’t necessarily a good thing anyway, because then the wood isn’t as strong.”

“It’s a great way to relearn what you think you know about everything,” says Gavin, who notes that a major breakthrough was meeting his artist hero, David Nash, who pointed out that what they are making is actually art — which has helped the couple relax into the project. “If you try and look at it more as a manufacturing factory, it is decades away from being efficient on that front. But you’ve got to look at it with a few different hats on. And looking at it from an art perspective is, I have to admit, a lot more fun and enjoyable and… a way to stay sane!”

But with all the frustrations, there are moments of huge reward amongst the frustrations. “Oh totally! The moment we first spotted birds living in one of the lamps we were growing — we thought, oh my god, we’ve created an outdoor factory that birds can live in!” says Gavin. “The underlying thing with the whole project is a question of what is the most subtle relationship we can have with nature, in order to get the objects we want without causing any damage — is it even possible to make things slightly better than you left them? It’s ecosystem design rather than tree shaping. And those few occasions where we get that right is divine.”

fullgrown.co.uk

Mark Hooper is an award-winning editor and writer. His book, The Great British Tree Biography is published by Pavilion. He lives in Kent, UK. mark-hooper.com and @markhooper