Your usual piece of wooden furniture—cut, sanded, painted— bears little resemblance to the tree it came from. So to create the Undergrowth bookcase, Italian design duo Alcarol deliberately took the opposite tack, preserving the unhewn edges of their lumber—moss and lichen and all.
The oak wood itself comes from logs found in the undergrowth of the Dolomite mountains in Italy. Once cut into planks, the wood's natural mossy edges were cast in resin, a technique often used to make moss jewelry. Alcarol then stacked three planks together to create a bookcase, each shelf decorated with what looks like a tiny terrarium.
Undergrowth is one in a trio of resin-based projects Alcarol is presenting at the London Design Festival. There's also Dolomyth, a piece of dolomite rock whose own rough, mossy surface is preserved in resin. And FishEye, whose core is an old underwater timber pole carved by water and shipworms. In each case, the resin is there to simply preserve the unpolished, idiosyncratic beauty of nature. [designboom]
Images via Alcarol