Nature finds a home in city apartments
Outdoor elements are taking root indoors, with designers miniaturising gardens and planting them in urban interiors
A few years ago New York-based designer Alison Spear encountered the work of Paula Hayes, an acclaimed artist best known for works that incorporate botany. Hayes' elaborate glass terrariums, filled with sand, rocks and plants, gave Spear an idea: what if these terrariums, used mostly as decorative pieces, could function as an architectural device?
"Could they be a room partition, or a column or coffee table?" Spear says. "I liked the idea of using something beautiful and rethinking it."
Spear decided to do something with that notion. At the Bath Club Estates, a luxury residential building now under development in Miami, the large living spaces will be split up by terrariums filled with items culled from nature.
"They will be like big fat walls of glass," Spear says, adding that the structures will be at least 3 metres long and 2.4 metres high.
"And when you look across the room, you are doing so through a haze of natural objects, filled with crystals, shells, fossils, orchids, turtles. It can be anything the buyer wants."
Spear's project - the 10,000 square feet villas will be finished in about 18 months - indicates an intriguing trend happening in the field of design, where more and more designers are looking at ways to bring elements of the outdoors inside. This goes far beyond sticking a potted plant in a corner. Instead, it is about imaginatively recreating indoors that sense of relaxation that comes from being in nature.