Truly Healthy Furnishings, Courtesy Of Mother Nature

According to the most recent report conducted by the American Lung Association, the cities with the highest levels of outdoor air-polluting particulates are Pittsburgh (PA), Fresno, Bakersfield, Los Angeles and Sacramento (CA), Salt Lake City and Logan (UT), Birmingham (AL), Chicago (IL) and Detroit (MI). It’s hard to imagine that the indoor air quality in a typical home is said to be worse than inhaling the outdoor air in the top polluted city, Pittsburgh – but it is.  If you’re thinking, “How is that possible? I don’t scour every single room in my house with hardcore chemical cleaners anymore…” or “I use an indoor HEPA filtration system…” there’s actually another steady source of off-gassing (in addition to the common offenders like building materials, carpeting, radon, air fresheners, malfunctioning furnaces/stoves/space heaters). Take a cold, hard look at your furniture.

The majority of furniture is treated with formaldehyde and other volatile organic compounds. These substances are known to cause eye, nose, and throat irritation, headaches, coughing, fatigue, rashes, and allergic reactions but in certain cases, they can also cause kidney and central nervous system damage, cancer and death (if the exposure is at extremely high concentrations). Items made with foam insulation, hardwood, plywood paneling, particleboard and fiberboard release these chemical pollutants and continue to do so long after the day we first introduce them into our homes. It’s definitely nice to sink down into a chair after a long hard day at work, but what if Mother Nature was the manufacturer instead of Ethan Allen or Crate and Barrel?

Actually, you’d have to move all of your worldly possessions outside in your backyard in order to enjoy Peter Cook and Becky Northey’s Pooktre Garden Chairs, but maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing after all. Their organic manipulation of nature’s oxygen and shade givers is somewhat like the fine art of Bonsai, but blown up on a far grander and more practical scale. It takes from 8 to 10 years to coax black cherry and wild plum saplings into their full scale incarnations, but each one is truly a work of art and as individual as its owner.

While they are based in Australia, if you contact them, they will teach you how to nurture and sculpt your own personal garden accent. The idea of creating a living piece of furniture has been embraced by a number of global artists, but many have failed to preserve the spirit of the specimen the way that Pooktre Tree Shapers have succeeded to do. They have spun off into other areas such as designing living sculptures, mirror frames, table bases, jewelry and decorative art pieces, but their tree furniture demonstrates that patience is a virtue – one that is rewarded with a place to pause, contemplate and inhale deeply.