Environment Furniture [www.environment-furniture.com] was built around an idea that’s as revolutionary as it is basic: the fundamentals of design come from nature. The name of the company itself follows this same trend — what you see is what you get — by combining truly responsible materials with a simply beautiful look. They create aesthetically sophisticated pieces with a truly organic quality, and further the conservation of nature by using sustainable products and environmentally responsible processes. As a company, for Environment Furniture, green design isn’t a trend or a hook: it’s a methodology, pure and simple.
Proud to source their primary material — wood — from a wide range of sustainable sources, Environment Furniture does a great job of letting the beauty of their materials shine in the design. According to Thomas Bina, chief designer at Environment Furniture (from an interview in the company’s new newsletter [www.environment-furniture.com] [PDF]), “The wood itself gives an amazing amount of creative ideas”. One particularly inspiring wood is Peroba Rosa, a native hardwood tree found in the depths of the southern Brazilian rainforest. Hard, heavy and dense, it has a dramatic rosy tint. He recalls the first time he saw Peroba, while visiting a friend in the Brazilian interior. “I saw this one piece of wood that looked like petrified stone,” he recalls. “It had the most incredible character and texture.”
The designs have a really interesting, unique aesthetic; a combination of Japanese-inspired minimalist and post-modern simplicity combine to create a timeless (but not old) look that’s really quite versatile. The Santos dining table (first image, above) and the Novo Console (directly above) are two great examples of the mixture of woods, textures and styles that really identify the synergy of environment and furniture; we also like the Campinas X Bench, pictured below. Though a relatively young, small (but growing) company, Environment Furniture is a great example of a company that practices sustainability — from materials to design to manufacture — simply because they think it’s the right thing to do, and that’s something anyone can be proud to own a part of. Learn more about them at their website [www.environment-furniture.com].
