The kitchen is often the busiest, most used, most loved room in the house. It’s where you congregate to eat, drink and be merry, and whether you fancy yourself a gourmet chef or just stop in to eat and run, kitchens tend to be the soul of your house. To help create a truly beautiful soul (and to help you feed your own), TreeHugger likes Henrybuilt [www.henrybuilt.com] kitchens.

Aesthetically, Henrybuilt provides a classic, elemental modernism, calibrated for the warmth and relative informality of American homes. They use lots of wood and other natural materials to create an organic, comfortable, inviting feeling, and do it all with a nod to sustainable materials, practices and general philosophy. Their goal is to offer a product of great beauty and functional utility that is designed and built to last, believing (and rightly so) that longevity is perhaps the most important element of sustainability.

They offer a full complement of kitchen services, from design consultation and planning to construction and installation, and feature furniture to help furnish your new room. When it comes to materials, they use a high percentage of FSC-certified woods [www.sundancechannel.com] and rapidly renewable materials, such as bamboo [www.sundancechannel.com]. All base units are constructed from FSC-certified panels, and all laminate fronts have an FSC-certified birch veneer core. To help top things off, they offer countertop materials based on recycled plastics and recycled paper materials.

They have showrooms in New York and Seattle (and one coming soon to Los Angeles), but have clients all around the country, and can help you design your kitchen from the ground up, or just provide products based on your existing plans. If you’re thinking about greening your kitchen with beautiful, long-lasting, sustainable materials and design, we can’t think of many places we like more than Henrybuilt.

Designer Christopher Douglas, the visionary behind Material Furniture [www.materialfurniture.com], is a smart guy. Tired of frequent packing, moving, and unpacking, he ingeniously devised a line of furniture that suited his nomadic lifestyle and quick-changing circumstances and appropriately named it Knock-Down, Drag-Out. Why? Because you can do just that.

Designed to construct and de-construct in mere seconds (really! As little as 15 seconds, in fact), and pack flat, it’s an invention of necessity whose functionality follows close behind. In addition to the table pictured above, there’s a bed, coffee table, bench, chair, end table, and some junior versions as well…enough to fill a room or two, for sure. But that’s just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

Like all of Material Furniture’s imaginative furniture, the AutoPilot Desk is built with Forest Stewardship Council (FSC)-certified woods, sourced locally, with easy assembly/disassembly instructions for maximum modular usability. This modern, unique desk comes with either a maple or walnut finish and can be splashed with one of four colors: ice blue, citron, tangerine and white. Using it might just inspire you to get more work done…

Perhaps the most artful of the pieces, we also like the Flipper Screen, whose nine circular openings are hinged and lockable, allowing for a nice shelf/screen flexibility — lock a few of ‘em open for a creative shelf, or close ‘em up when you need a room divider or screen. Available in both walnut and birch veneer, it follows Material Furniture’s commitment to local, sustainable, modular furniture with a modern twist; all of this adds up to one TreeHugging company. Learn more about them from their website [www.materialfurniture.com]; the furniture is available from Vivavi [www.vivavi.com], Design Public [www.designpublic.com] and re:modern [www.re-modern.com].