Growing Furniture on Trees: The 20-Year Dream Taking Root in England

Imagine walking through an orchard and harvesting a fully-formed chair instead of an apple. That’s not science fiction—it’s what Alice and Gavin Munro have been doing on their two-acre English farm since 2006, and their living furniture is starting to turn heads in the art world.

The concept sounds like pure fantasy, but the process is rooted in patient horticultural science. Gavin came up with the idea while recovering from spinal surgery as a child, lying in a hospital bed observing the landscape. Years later, after studying art and furniture design, he decided to actually attempt it. The method is deceptively simple in concept but demands years of precision: young tree branches are guided along metal frames as they grow, tied carefully with garden ties at specific growth windows when bending is easiest. After the branches fuse together into the desired shape—usually 6 to 9 years per chair—the piece is harvested and dried for another year before it becomes a finished artwork.

So far, the couple has experimented with willow, apple, cherry, oak, ash, beech, and hawthorn, discovering that growing the chairs upside down works better than the upright approach they originally tried. They’ve produced only a handful of sittable pieces over two decades, which explains why the finished chairs command prices around £75,000—nearly $100,000. At that price point, these aren’t mass-market furniture; they’re sculptures you can actually sit on.

What’s remarkable is Gavin’s vision for scale. He and Alice are now launching the Full Grown Academy to teach others the craft, with dreams of establishing an orchard in every town. A bronze cast of one of their chairs debuted at May’s Chelsea Flower Show in the UK, and pieces have shown up in galleries worldwide. They’re also encouraging people to try growing their own furniture in their gardens, making the concept more accessible than the professional operation in Derbyshire.

The couple readily acknowledge they’ll be fortunate to have a dozen new chairs over their 20 years of labor—a sobering reminder that some things can’t be rushed. But that’s precisely what makes this work compelling. In an age of fast furniture and disposable design, they’re literally planting the seeds of heirloom pieces that take a human lifetime to create. It’s bonsai meets 3D printing meets agricultural patience, and it’s utterly impossible to replicate at scale. That’s not a bug; it’s the entire point.