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botanical design with wayward plants london
101 Plays3 years ago
Welcome to episode 59 of the green & healthy places podcast in which we explore the themes of wellbeing and sustainability in real estate and hospitality today.
This time around I’m in London talking to Tom Kendall, Associate Director of Wayward Plants, a London based landscape, art and architecture practice with a strong botanical bent.
Born and raised on a farm in Cornwall, Tom studied Architecture at the Bartlett School of Architecture (BSc) and the Royal College of Art (MA)
Our conversation covers their work creating biophilic public benches that convey a message about inner city air quality, large scale plant donations as an ethical business practice, designing botanically inspired playgrounds, their work designing a botanical memorial for Nelson Mandela in Liverpool and their nature-inspired sustainable interior concept for a Stella McCartney store.
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Transcript
Introduction: Wellbeing & Sustainability in Real Estate
00:00:10
Speaker
Welcome to episode 59 of the Green and Healthy Places podcast, in which we explore the themes of wellbeing and sustainability in real estate and hospitality today.
Meet Tom Kendall from Wayward Plants
00:00:21
Speaker
I'm your host, Matt Morley, founder of Biophilico Healthy Buildings, and this week I'm in London talking to Tom Kendall, associate director of Wayward Plants, a London-based landscape, art, and architect to practice with a strong botanical bent, as we'll see.
Projects: Biophilic Benches & Botanical Memorials
00:00:39
Speaker
Born and raised on a farm in Cornwall, Tom studied architecture at the Bartlett School of Architecture and then the Royal College of Art for his MA. He's been with Wayward now for well over a decade and our conversation covers a lot of their previous work such as creating biophilic public benches to convey a message about inner-city air quality
00:00:59
Speaker
We look at their work doing large-scale plant donations as part of their ethical business practices or ESG, how they design botanically inspired playgrounds, their work creating botanical memorial for Nelson Mandela in Liverpool, and even nature inspired sustainable interior concepts for a Stella McCartney store on London's Bond Street. Beneath all of their projects is a fundamental belief in the nourishing and healing power of connecting with nature.
00:01:28
Speaker
So whether that be designing an outdoor garden or bringing a garden into an interior space, I'll let Tom explain exactly how that plays out because it can be quite fantastical, but it's really a concept driven design that we're talking here. So over to Tom to tell you more about it.
Air-Purifying Benches: Awareness & Impact
00:01:48
Speaker
Tom, thanks for joining us today on the podcast. Great to have you here.
00:01:52
Speaker
Thank you very much. Very, very glad to be invited on. I'm going to jump in with a question around benches, better air benches. You know, the ways, the many different ways of bringing nature back into the city are one of the things that really inspire me and keep me going at what I do. And I think there's a shared
00:02:10
Speaker
a common interest there between what we were up to and what makes me tick. And let's start with something that can seem almost banal, a public bench, but there are ways clearly, and you've proven this, that that can become something that's more functional and that plays an actual role in purifying the air within the city. So I'm going to start with that one. Tell us about that little project of yours.
00:02:34
Speaker
Yes, so this was a collaboration with the Business Improvement District down in South London and it was kind of interesting the way you kind of raised that actually because it didn't start out as a bench. The initial proposal was supposed to be a gateway. It was supposed to be something big and grand and actually after some really interesting discussions with the bid
00:02:56
Speaker
We decided to change it to try and in a way take up more space and become more purposeful and much more kind of useful within the public realm. We knew there were other people who were doing other kinds of more threshold gateway-esque strategies anyway, so we wanted to try and find a way to integrate ourselves in a little bit more of a purposeful environment.
00:03:15
Speaker
We also knew that we were going to initially be cited in Borough Market, which is obviously this amazing sort of threshold and space of exchange and constant flux and change. So we needed something that had this kind of element of transition to it. And for us, this idea of just a simple bench was in a way, I guess, the key that unlocked that for us. We wanted something that was going to be colorful,
00:03:42
Speaker
something that was going to be very simply interactive and also obviously one of the key part of roofs was to be something green so unusual for us we ended up working with a monoculture of ivy so we filled these very simple mesh structures that we designed these mesh cages of benches
00:04:00
Speaker
and we filled them with English ivy which is known to be really good for air quality and we knew we were never going to fill them with enough to actively change their quality but for us it was very much about raising awareness which is also why we didn't want to be stuck in one site so whilst we started out in Borough Market the whole point with these is that they were mobile they could go out and kind of fill the suburb and it's I'm still obviously like
00:04:21
Speaker
Four years later now, I'm still getting texts from friends being like, ah, I just saw your bench on this street. I just saw your bench on this street. I just sat in this square and had my lunch on your bench. And it's been really nice to sort of just see that kind of knock on effect of where they ended up and how people have been using them. I think that's one of my favorite things in all projects like this is that by doing something a little bit fun, but also hopefully quite pertinent and green.
00:04:44
Speaker
it's amazing that the responses that you get from people there's something so wonderfully kind of human and intuitive about them that people really draw on. So let me dig into that a little bit cause it's the way you describe it. You know if we had say a closed environment let's say it's a healthy building project or specifically a workplace environment and there would be a much more tangible set of
00:05:09
Speaker
data and outputs that we'd be looking for there in terms of, for example, purifying the air. The way you described it is very much more of a, when you're working in the public realm, perhaps the reality of the problem, the scale of it is so huge that you're never gonna be able to make a meaningful impact on the indoor air quality in that particular area of London. And therefore, you set out with a different mission in a sense. It's about,
00:05:36
Speaker
Awareness, would you say? It's about what do you think from the other side? What were they looking for to start a discussion and get people thinking about air quality as much as anything?
00:05:46
Speaker
Yeah, that was definitely one of the clients kind of key concerns with this was to sort of have a discussion on air quality in Southwark, obviously. It's a huge, uh, conflict point. So many roads, so many deliveries, all different times of day, like the amount of pollution varies so much. I mean, even down to like the huge spike in Christmas because of Amazon deliveries to everybody's offices. Like it's quite insane, the changes. And so these are, these are all facts and figures that we already knew.
00:06:10
Speaker
So we know there is this spike, we know there is a problem. So for us, whilst we only had a budget of £30,000, we're not going to solve all pollution on £30,000 in Southwark. So we try to find... It's exactly finding that way of raising awareness. I think that's kind of key for us in every project we do, though. There's always two strands. One is just the simple factor of enjoyability in the public realm, that simple, the basic user interface of creating something that people will just use.
00:06:40
Speaker
And then there is the lesson to be learned and it's it's not we try not to make it like a giant black card you know we don't want to put a big billboard in front of using a pollution is wrong it's usually a little bit more passive or subtle so on the benches we included a series of quotes or facts.
00:06:58
Speaker
about the area and about pollution levels or different plants that benefit us and the environment. We also had a series of sensors that were up for six months on them that were measuring the pollution in the different areas in particular.
00:07:15
Speaker
And as they moved around, there was some data that was collected just showing the amount of pollution in these different spaces. And that was also then streamed to the Business Improvement District's website. So they was just this ongoing track. They've sort of since been removed, slightly due to vandalism. You can't solve every problem. But we did manage to get a really interesting look at the pollution levels and how just moving two streets away from the main thoroughfare
00:07:43
Speaker
you put the amount of pollution would lower and there's I think there's now actually a green map that's been created of walks around Southwark that's sort of based not just on that data but on like a much broader sort of series of investigations to sort of create different pathways to get to work, to get to school, to make it a bit more pedestrian friendly. So it's been nice to see there's been this other knock-on that's actually just about walking your environment which is really lovely.
00:08:10
Speaker
Wayward operates in this fascinating space somewhere between these sort of public-private partnerships, and it's one of the things I found most interesting seeing about looking back through some of your previous projects and some of the work that you've done. Another one that caught my eye, perhaps with a slightly different focus, but the Morlane Community Garden,
00:08:28
Speaker
The idea of creating or co-designing effectively in architectural interventions in the form of a garden in the local community is a way to presumably bring an element of nature back into that particular corner of the city. Talk to us a bit about
Co-Designing a Community Garden: Challenges & Successes
00:08:43
Speaker
that. How does that work in terms of co-designing and in terms of creating something that connects with the area around it but still has a functional benefit, presumably?
00:08:52
Speaker
More Lane was a really interesting one when it comes to engagement because there was already a small community garden on More Lane. There was also a huge future proposal that I think is currently under construction or soon to be constructed, which was the whole redevelopment of the street of More Lane that we ended up working on.
00:09:11
Speaker
And so we were initially invited in actually slightly as a mediator between the City of London and a series of local residents groups where there seemed to be a bit of a disconnect. So our first role there was actually to act as this sort of middle person to sort of help them communicate and to find out what was missing, what wasn't being communicated effectively and where things might be improved.
00:09:34
Speaker
through initially we just started having a lot of conversations we didn't even dive into design like we usually would dive straight into that and really enjoy the process but this actually the first I think three meetings were all about conversation and communication and out of that the thing that eventually we sort of discovered was that the future proposal had zero relevance to the site and zero relevance to the community and that was their problem so we were both eventually asked to not only just come up with a green sort of intervention for the site but also to
00:10:04
Speaker
challenge the entire future proposal for it. And so that's kind of what was developed. So the future scheme had no relevance to the Barbican. It didn't reference its architecture. It didn't reference the community. So that's why what we developed out of it through a series of Ben design workshops with the community was how to integrate different aspects of the Barbican's very famous architecture.
00:10:27
Speaker
So not only were they concrete objects that we created in the end, but they were also etched into to expose aggregate in the same way that the barbecue had previously been hand-carved. There were certain color themes that were kind of pulled out of the area, as well as referencing old and new planting. And so, yeah, there was this whole series of different strands that we had to kind of carefully weave together in this. And at the core of it was just that simple, active kind of conversation as the core of the engagement process.
00:10:54
Speaker
Perhaps for anyone who's not aware of the Barbican or isn't from London or doesn't know London too well, it's often referred to as this sort of iconic, brutalist structure, right? But within it, once you're inside, it is also home to an amazingly lush series of gardens and even indoor, kind of like indoor greenhouse scenario they have going on there. It's fascinating, right? So there's much more perhaps than you'd expect for someone doing what you just described in terms of creative inspiration.
00:11:25
Speaker
Very much so and I think the whole, all the people that live there are also incredibly proud of it as both this weird and brutalist concrete monster battleship and it's incredibly sort of verdant like so there's some like amazing public gardens as well as private gardens even down to the way the window boxes are curated on a really small domestic level there's a huge sense of pride that comes with it
00:11:52
Speaker
So yeah, it was a really interesting one to kind of navigate because we were very, and it was interesting for us to be dealing with a particular block, not even the entire residence, it was a particular block who were really focused on their relationship to the street on one side and to the interior of the Barbican on the other, as well as to the Heron Tower kind of overlooking it as well. So we had a series of other sort of other adjacencies
00:12:15
Speaker
that were aware of the barbecue and they didn't live in it too so it was this really interesting meeting of different voices from that one street that all had to pile into this one project but we ended up you know it was great for us because as well as these conversations we got to then invite people into do planting.
00:12:31
Speaker
in the project too so we had a really nice just hands-on aspect to it beyond the design and engagement and then following up on that obviously there was a very big kind of report we put together that detailed every conversation everything that had ever been said as well as how it integrated into the designs and
00:12:47
Speaker
Now actually we're slightly back on site again looking at how our designs have impacted it and we're now redesigning the new planters to sort of include some of the details and motifs that the community thought were specifically
00:13:03
Speaker
point into interesting from what we did. So even our own design got re-critiqued, re-engaged with at the end of the whole thing. And the community groups came in and told us what they didn't like about those and what was successful and what they would like to see go forward.
Corporate Social Responsibility: Plant Adoption Initiative
00:13:15
Speaker
So it sort of is a funny one for us because we're very much putting ourselves on that firing line and on the front line to be critiqued. But I think that's also what way we're doing quite well. We're so lively in the whole design process and whatever project we do. We're quite used to that, I think.
00:13:31
Speaker
Well, we can come back around to the idea of the occasional, let's say, sort of private or commercial commission, because I know you do those too. But it is an interesting theme, the idea of doing works for the community, for the public realm. And I know there's also, allied to that, your own concept or sort of
00:13:51
Speaker
a big idea around engaging and giving back, which some could say is a version of corporate social responsibility from your side or ESG or it's certainly a cohesive approach within the overall framework of being a business working in the space of sustainability and biophilia that you too make an effort to
00:14:11
Speaker
to give back via plants. And it's not necessarily something that we might all think of, but it's an interesting concept. So how do you do that? How do you take a plant and then kind of give it back to the community via your house away with plants concept?
00:14:27
Speaker
So this was something that started even before Wayward was Wayward in a way. The very first thing that actually sort of sparked this conversation for us and this whole idea was we saw a plant thrown out of a window in New York City and it was strewn across the street. It was incredibly dramatic. There was a couple shouting above. It was wonderfully filmic. Some sort of weird divorce or argument kind of happening about them. So we picked up this plant from a broken home.
00:14:53
Speaker
We took it home, cared for it, kind of brought it back to life, repotted it, and then we gave it to a friend. And the conversation we had with that friend was more in depth than I think most conversations we'd ever had. And this single plant had activated this new conversation with somebody that we thought we knew quite well. And that sort of sparked something in us. We were like, well, this is a thing. This active exchange is giving us something. It's giving them something.
00:15:19
Speaker
So that's sort of, we've sort of developed most of Wayward's approach to things out of this active exchange and this active giving when it comes to nature, but also using nature to then explore stories. And so whilst we started off with one plant, every year we've gradually expanded on this, so moving to like 10 plants.
00:15:35
Speaker
50 plants a hundred plants so creating what we call plant adoptions where we now invite people where we collect plants from unwanted homes and we invite people into spaces and they have to fill out an adoption form and prove to us that they're going to be good plant parents by drawing or describing the home it's going to go to.
00:15:53
Speaker
And only once we deem them a good plant parent will they then get the plant in exchange. And it's become this fantastic way of exploring people's stories with gardens and nature. And it's not even just about filling out the form, sometimes it's just the conversations that you have again around these events and just exploring how people...
00:16:11
Speaker
see plants and their relationships with them. Sometimes this comes through in recipes and remedies. Sometimes it just comes through in the sheer pride they have in their gardens. But we now use this as a tool for exploring public space. We use this as a tool for large-scale engagement. And so we also now give away through the same scheme, usually around 10,000 plants a year from the RHS flower shows, so Chelsea Flower Show.
00:16:33
Speaker
Hampton Court Flower Show. So we now give about 10,000 plants a year to schools and community gardens, mostly in and around London, gradually working our way out a little bit further afield as well.
00:16:46
Speaker
It's a, it's a really unique approach to, to giving back, and I think whether anything comes of it and the project that we've collaborated on recently together or not certainly from my perspective being on the other side of the table there it was a very strong calling part in terms of being able to
00:17:04
Speaker
create a supply chain and a network of consultants and other service providers within that project. Yeah, within the sort of resource requirements for that project, we were able to yet again tick another box on or go beyond that actually sort of say that, look, everyone is aligned behind us in terms of ESG principles and giving back and
00:17:24
Speaker
Just providing plants and doing the kind of design that you do would almost be enough. But I think it's a very generous step that you make that reflects, I think, your internal ethos and how you see the world, that you make the effort to do that. And certainly, I think it has huge legs in terms of the future as more and more businesses adopt that type of thinking and look for partner suppliers who also follow a similar trail of thought
00:17:51
Speaker
You mentioned schools. I know that there's a playground that you're involved in recently. I find playgrounds really interesting proposition. They can often be so kind of cold and heartless, but there's so many options now. I often take inspiration from playgrounds I see in places like Germany and Scandinavia, where they just seem to have completely reinvented what a kid's playground could look like. And then I see some other ones here around me in Spain that look pretty
00:18:20
Speaker
pretty frightening and harsh. But tell me about Asté's rose, the rose playground, because I know that was one you were deeply involved in yourself.
Redesigning Astis Row Playground: Community & Nature
00:18:29
Speaker
Yeah, so Astis Row was a really interesting pigment to be a part of because it was already embedded between two gardens in a way. So it's part of the New River Walk in the middle of Islington. But when we first got faced with it, it was this very tarmac, heavy, brutal, sad, grey, crumbling space, as you can imagine, sort of remnant from the 70s.
00:18:54
Speaker
Previously it had a whole wonderful life so again through conversations with the locals we started to gather stories about what it used to be, the fact that they used to be a little speculations around streams running through it, there were a whole sort of weird little myths about who remembered what. But the key for us was this connection between the two existing gardens and there's this amazing
00:19:13
Speaker
boulder garden kind of that sort of runs part of the new river walk that connects right into where this playground space was but there was no connection between it at all it was this it's like they just sliced through it and got rid of it so in a way it was sort of almost like to absorb a word it was kind of a sort of act of rewilding we wanted to kind of re bring like bring this
00:19:36
Speaker
bring this boulder garden kind of back into fruition. It was also when we went on site with kids, when we did our community engagement work for that, we didn't want to just get stuck in a local town hall talking about it. We went onto the playground and we actually basically played with kids for half a day.
00:19:51
Speaker
in the space, both in the playground and up and down the area. So really, they got the kids to take us on tours rather than us going to take them on tours. And the kids sort of walked us and played with us all around the space, up and down these boulders over trees. And in a way, we decided to take all the lessons learned from the existing garden that was an amazing topography and landscape and bring that into the playground.
00:20:15
Speaker
Whilst also having to handle all the many things that come with a playground, you know, health and safety issues, the fact there needs to be a ball court which is never going to be the most appealing.
00:20:25
Speaker
especially on a sort of slightly tight council budget. But we were actually really impressed with the way that the council really took the ideas on when we mentioned to them this idea of exaggerating the idea of a boulder garden. So it's now become, as you sort of navigate your way through and into the garden from the existing space, there's now this massive sort of rise in giant colourful boulders that are like giant climbing frames and walls.
00:20:47
Speaker
So things that can be sort of really rambled over. We changed the entire topography of the space. Previously, it was just very flat. So we've actually created huge hills to the point of which some parents were very much questioning the steepness of things and how much kids wouldn't be hidden. But we kept putting these series of challenging provocations in front of them based on the case study of the existing site.
00:21:11
Speaker
and what was making their kids happy, making them active as well, actually getting the most from play. And so we really played with this natural landscape and pulled it into the site. And we worked with a lot of amazing play safety inspectors as well, who very much put the idea of a risk-benefit analysis into things. So we're no longer that concerned about a few falls or trips or hazards here and there. It's actually now about risk-benefit analysis. So if the risk is great, but the benefit is greater,
00:21:40
Speaker
then that's actually deemed to be a really positive thing. And for me, the whole thing really came out of very much replicating the existing landscape, as well as kind of learning from my own childhood. You know, I grew up on a farm near a beach, quite idyllic, but there's sort of translation of how I played as a child and my natural landscape and the lessons I've learned from that.
00:21:59
Speaker
alongside working and talking with these children and their appreciation of the natural landscape sort of brought it all in and then we you know as well as that that's just a general topography we then play with plants and planting as well on the site like introducing new trees so sort of creating moments of almost like screening through planting so ways to kind of hide
00:22:20
Speaker
but not hide because you can't, you know, you're not really supposed to hide in a playground. It's not, you know, it's not, but it's it was ways of creating moments of play and interaction where the kids felt like they could disappear and hide from their parents and then reappear and emerge, even though they were never really out of somebody's sight and plants with this kind of perfect
00:22:37
Speaker
visual half-screening between them and again we pulled the planting very much out of what had previously been there on site as well as already existed just down the walk so it was a really nice way of integrating the whole of the history site as well as the way it was very much used by its existing community and then just exaggerating it and enhancing it.
00:22:58
Speaker
So every project can be completely different in a sense, right? There's this common theme with what you do. Some people might describe it as sort of outdoor biophilic design, others might call it, you know, creative landscaping. But then laid on top of that, there is the use case, as in, in this case, okay, who's using it? It's kids. And what do they want to do? They want to have fun in a safe way.
00:23:21
Speaker
something else, a completely different project, but I think with some similar foundations, there would be something like the Nelson Mandela Memorial Project up in Liverpool, where again, you're using nature as a, for its, let's say the sort of mental, quasi-spiritual benefits that I think we all connect with nature on some level, and perhaps in this instance, focusing more on a sense of calm rather than on a sense of vitality, but I think still with
00:23:50
Speaker
similar principles behind it.
Botanical Memorial for Nelson Mandela
00:23:52
Speaker
So how do you go about taking something like that, or it's perhaps more of a solemn occasion, but I think also with a backstory, right, in terms of a connection between the great man himself and gardening, is that right? Yeah, very much so. So the Mandela Project is kind of an absolute privilege to work on, as you can imagine. And when we first got approached about this, we were a little unsure if we would be able to find our place within the project.
00:24:19
Speaker
And so, but when we started researching and reading, we discovered this amazing use that he himself had for gardens. So within the prisons that he was in, he used the gardens to grow food, both for himself and the other inmates to sort of increase their own sustenance. Because as you can imagine, the food was not particularly great in a Robin Island prison in a quarry. But then he also used it as an active exchange between them and the prison guards to allow books
00:24:45
Speaker
to come into the space. So he used it as this tool for both sustenance and education. So he would turn the quarries into temporary classrooms during lunch so they would then educate each other and that was all through this exchange of edible foods for books and other educational materials. So there was this very nurturing aspect of the garden
00:25:07
Speaker
But there was also this wonderfully subversive act that was also happening where he was hiding the manuscripts for Long Walk to Freedom that they were all writing collectively with all of the other prisoners and they would hide them in the garden so they would never get discovered. So in his act of kind of digging the garden over and to grow plants he'd be hiding these manuscripts. So the Hopper Gardens had this amazing dual language.
00:25:30
Speaker
which we obviously then wanted to try and bring over. So the gardens were originally built either just dug in the ground or dug into oil barrels, which would be cut in half as a very simple on-site piece of infrastructure. So we've replicated these oil barrels in form and scale. So on site, there's going to be 32 of these simple, very simple cylinder shapes that are going to have his words on. And that's the reference in a way to Mandela and his approach to gardening.
00:25:57
Speaker
But what we were really keen on is that it wasn't just a memorial and it wasn't just a public artwork. I don't think we will ever do just a public artwork. It will always have to be interactive. It will always have to be education. It will have to be a place that's accessible and inviting. And so very much in the way that he turned the quarry into a classroom, we wanted to turn the island that this project is going to be on, which is in the middle of Princes Park in the middle of a lake and on this island.
00:26:27
Speaker
we wanted to turn this island into essentially a theatre or at the very least an outdoor classroom somewhere that is active and engaging. He himself was this, yes, it is a very solemn project in a way, but he himself was an incredibly engaging, happy human being who brought a huge amount of life and colour as well as sort of activism
00:26:51
Speaker
to everything that he did and so we really wanted to try and capture all of him not just certain aspects of him and his relationship to Liverpool was always one of action and engagement and community.
00:27:06
Speaker
you know he very he very actively made the decision to ignore Margaret Thatcher and like almost you know like UK politics at the time and bring himself into Liverpool to where he was being supported by the trade unions and he had this really wonderful very fruitful relationship with across all the different communities in the area and so they they supported him he supported them um and so we want to try and bring all of this flavour into the project um
00:27:31
Speaker
And even now it's kind of amazing we go into schools in Liverpool and we've been doing workshops as well with kids there and they already understand this at the ages of 9, 10, 11. They already understand this relationship that Liverpool had with Nelson Mandela and they understand the importance of this. So when we talked to them about this sense of gardens,
00:27:50
Speaker
it's kind of a really nice way in for them into this act of gardening and hopefully when they come to use the space in the end they will treat it as a classroom and as a theatre and as a space to engage and learn and meet as a community and not just as a memorial but underneath it there will still be his words just sort of gently carved in and around the space so that you can go there for everything not just one thing.
00:28:14
Speaker
It's an example of the level of narrative and big ideas that I think drive your projects rather than just something working on a purely aesthetic level. There's a lot going on behind it for anyone who's prepared to look into it or even prepared to spend time there and engage with that experience rather than just seeing the visual aspect. There's always an experiential component.
00:28:38
Speaker
There you're dealing with something of a fairly considerable scale. You're able to play with the landscape as you wish. But when you're working indoors, when you're working in a
00:28:49
Speaker
in an interior space of, say, 200 or 300 square meters in a retail store, such as the project you did for the Stella McCartney flagship.
Nature-Inspired Design for Stella McCartney
00:28:56
Speaker
How do you go about trying to create that same experiential component and integrate those big ideas around bringing the outside world in, biophilia, et cetera, using certain types of plants? It must be a very different mindset, right? But for example, with that project, what was the brief and how did you respond to it in the end with what emerged?
00:29:20
Speaker
So in a way, there's a lot of similarities. They're both very personal projects and we're very much dealing in a way with the image of an individual. So obviously Nelson Mandela, he had his particular approach to gardens. And Stella McCartney, she herself has a very particular approach to the environment and sustainability. So there was already a lot of almost like core elements to both projects that we could easily latch on to.
00:29:42
Speaker
And then it was about kind of working out how to develop it and explore it from there. So with Bond Street and this new store, we knew that her interior design team were very much trying to explore something new when it came to retail.
00:29:58
Speaker
they weren't just trying to create a store, what they really wanted to look at was how to integrate elements of her life and her own experiences into the space, not just her ethos, but it was really interesting going into meetings with them because suddenly there'd be a lot more sort of personal conversations around her upbringing and growing up and how it started to translate.
00:30:18
Speaker
into different fabrics and finishes kind of all over the space, as well as treating the whole building almost a little bit more like a home. It had a very domestic feel. There was very much this sort of welcoming hallway. There's this almost sitting room aspect upstairs. So these sort of different domestic approaches that allow it to become a different kind of place, a much more one that you're living in, a lifestyle, not just a store.
00:30:45
Speaker
And that was something that we really kind of found really fascinating. And some of the first conversations we had was how to translate this into something green. And obviously this idea of the garden is kind of core to any domestic situation and to the sense of the homely in a way. But then obviously in complete counter to that, we needed to, you know, there is a wonderful kind of polish that comes with a flagship store on Bond Street. And so we wanted to create something that was
00:31:14
Speaker
complimentary but also incredibly raw. So lots of the finishes and stuff that were going into the design of the store itself with all this beautiful kind of polished brass and concrete work and playing with papier mache materials and things. There was a lot of process going on. So we kind of wanted to go right the other way and try and keep process to an absolute minimum.
00:31:32
Speaker
and to really focus on very raw, simple combinations of elements. So we were speaking to her a lot about her father's island up in Scotland and her relationship to stone. And so what we decided to do, we proposed this idea of a boulder garden right in the middle of the store. It's very solid, very weighty, but at the same time relatively calm, sort of meditative
00:31:58
Speaker
a series of objects. And it was instantly, it just was latched on to, she felt a huge resonance with this idea of the weight of stone. She's a big believer in sort of geological and crystals and things as well. So this idea of giving weight to the store was kind of a real sort of fascination for her.
00:32:18
Speaker
And then after that, it was actually about how to work it into the ethos of Stella and the whole sustainability aspect. So we made sure that every stone in the place was sourced within the UK, carved within the UK. All the mosses either came from local growers or were recycled from Chelsea Flower Show and built into the garden. So then yeah, it became this very interesting conversation between
00:32:42
Speaker
the simple raw material of the stone and how to sort of integrate it into a sort of green environment. It was really fascinating because obviously a store like this is supposed to be all about selling usually in a way and the retail estate value of a site like that when you look through the window is vast. So to give that much space to a green element, to a natural element,
00:33:09
Speaker
is a really big statement it's incredibly bold in a retail environment and so we felt like she we felt i guess like she was taking us seriously. I'm and that she was giving you the credit it kind of needed and deserved as a statement about the environment and so it was up like we gave her the equivalent amount of attention and wait and.
00:33:29
Speaker
It was a really wonderful kind of project to be engaged upon in that regard because we were very much treated like collaborators in that space which was really nice. It's a really unusual case study and I think one that adds a lot of weight to your credentials as well. We'll add a photo of that in the show notes slash in the online promotion for this one as well.
Engage with Wayward Plants: Get Involved
00:33:51
Speaker
So listen, if people want to follow along and read more about what you're up to, where's the best place for them to go or to see what you're up to?
00:33:58
Speaker
Maybe just have a look at our website. We treat it like a live newsfeed as well. I have to confess, we're not the greatest on Instagram at the moment, but we're getting there slowly. We're too busy being outdoors rather than just online. But our website is www.wayward.co.uk. We have a newsfeed on there for things that we're doing. If you do want to get involved with any of our plant rehoming schemes as well, there's links on there that you can either sign up to as a school or community or as a volunteer. And yeah, usually for sort of have a look about
00:34:27
Speaker
usually around April when there's usually some really good opportunities to come and help sort of volunteer and collect plants with us and enjoy the flower shows and hopefully in the meantime there'll be some sort of new projects popping up along the way in the next few months as well. Sounds exciting. We should all hopefully involve a community engagement aspect as and live builds and all sorts as usual for Wayward. Love it, well I'm a big fan so best of luck with everything that's coming around the corner for 2023. Thank you very much Matt, thank you.