Townend House, Hopton, Derbyshire

It was in the kitchen garden of Alice Munro’s late mother’s 17

-century house, nestled just outside the rolling Peak District, that the first of her and her husband Gavin’s chairs came to life: a mystical creation of willow branches unfathomably grown directly from the ground into a piece of usable furniture.

“We have some pictures of the terraces being built for the trees to be planted and my mum looking on a bit bemused. But she was one of those archetypal English eccentrics, so she was fully behind it,” remembers Alice, who’d had a bucolic childhood in this farmhouse with its low-slung beams, roaring wood burners and alcoves in the recessed stone mullion windows.

There are orchards, paddocks and views across Carsington Water at Townend House, which meant “ponies, mud, dens and so many little nooks and crannies that we could all hide away in,” says Alice. “My mother Vaila said: ‘Well, I’m not using the kitchen garden at the moment, if you can be bothered to terrace it and get rid of the bindweed, go ahead and use it. So, we did.”

If the end result is a spell-like artwork, Alice and Gavin’s method is strangely logical: growing chairs around custom frames, grafting the branches together as they form into shape, letting the chairs become one solid piece over at least four years, before being cut off the tree, dried for a year and then planed and sanded to finish. There’s a common-sense straightforwardness to growing a tree in the right shape to begin with, rather than chopping one up and piecing it back together.

The garden at Townend House was a sanctuary for those early experiments after some false starts, first in an overly shady corner of a friend’s farm where terraces had to be back breakingly replanted, only for the saplings to be trampled by cows – and finished off by rabbits.

Four years in the making, the triumph of that successful prototype from the kitchen garden gave Alice and Gavin the confidence to create their very own “chair orchard.” In 2008, they planted up an entire former hay meadow with 3,000 trees five miles away from Alice’s childhood home, near the market town of Wirksworth. It was then that Gavin gave up his job as a gardener and web designer to commit himself to something that he can now see he might have always been destined for.

There was the overgrown bonsai tree with the distinct appearance of a chair that captured his childhood imagination at a time when he himself was being shaped by a frame after several spinal operations (“it’s where I learnt patience,” he says); and later making driftwood furniture on a beach in San Francisco. “It sounded a bit bonkers to people to start with, but after a while you realise it makes complete sense and the way we actually do things is bonkers. It’s been a satisfying turnaround from being the madman in the field to people seeing what we’ve done. It’s been beyond our wildest dream,” Gavin muses.

As Townend House, where those early seeds of Full Grown were planted, 

, Alice and Gavin reflect on making furniture that has captured the imagination of the art world (freshly harvested chairs have been displayed at Louis Vuitton’s Sloane Street store, with others going to Paris, Singapore, Los Angeles and New York) – and the joy of making something ergonomically seamless, designed to last. “Eventually there’ll be a point when chairs will have been handed down by great-grandmothers,” says Gavin. “Full Grown is multi-generational. Some of the things we were thinking of being able to do at the beginning are now in the realm of things that hang over to the next generation to take care of.”

: “I think inherently we know how much damage we do to the environment by just existing. And we might not thoroughly understand it yet, but there’s something deep down telling us that having a more subtle relationship with nature and being considerate of the environment is important, which is why Full Grown has captured people’s imagination. But now it’s also the fact that it’s actually really working as a way of making furniture – and it looks good. It’s encouraging knowing that people have shaped trees for millennia, whether that’s hedge laying or coppicing. I think the most practical example for us is the Native American signposts, marker trees, where oaks, maples and elms were bent in the direction of landmarks.”

: “We started out with willow, which is a great thing to experiment with, but it grows very quickly which isn’t necessarily the way forward. You want it to grow into the right shape, rather than growing as quickly as possible which can push it out of shape. Ash was perfect, but then we got ash dieback. So, we’re learning. There have been so many pitfalls along the way: cows, squirrels and ash dieback are not to be underestimated…”

: “I think we really have to learn to think like a tree – I’m realising that we’re really not that different from each other. Trees just want the same things as people: food, water, light, sociability, space and a decent environment to exist in. It’s hard because it’s one thing talking about being nice to trees, but we’ve not really got a grasp on being nice to each other yet. It’s all a bit heavy really. Having flexibility when it comes to trees is probably the biggest lesson. You can’t force them to do something, and you realise that some of them aren’t going to grow into chairs or tables even. We’re not doing anything to the trees that wouldn’t happen to them normally; we’re bending the branches in the same way that could happen in a gentle storm.”

Alice: “I think having a chair in the permanent collection at MoMA in San Francisco (made possible by Sarah Myerscough Gallery, who represent us) felt like a pretty big moment for us, as was winning an RHS gold medal with our Louis Vuitton display for Chelsea in Bloom in 2022. I’d just lost my mum (who we named the Vaila Chair after) and so I felt her saying: ‘Come on, go for this.’ But we’ve toned down the elaborate dreaming. I’ve banned Gavin from thinking about growing a chest of drawers. We can’t get there, not today, not this decade.”

Gavin: “This kind of furniture making is a slow burner, but part of the reason it’s taken so seriously now is the fact that it’s increasingly looking like it really could be a common form of manufacturing. And these are things that could last for hundreds of thousands of years [with no joints that could loosen over time], so that whole thing about having fewer, better things is right at the heart of what we’re doing.”

Madeleine Silver

Kim Lightbody

Carole Poirot

Homes

In a secret woodland location outside Wirksworth, a series of serpentine shapes emerge from the thick foliage. It’s here that Alice Munro and her husband Gavin patiently grow furniture from living willow branches. We join them in their otherworldly “chair orchard” to discuss the roots of their art form

A Private View: how the seed of an unfathomable idea took root in the grounds of a childhood garden