Living Moss Wallpaper by Nendo
Green walls and roofs are growing (no pun intended) more popular every day in both private home designs and public design projects, but one interior designer has taken the idea to the next level, bringing to life interior wall surfaces with real greenery.
From a green wallpaper design built of actual moss to a delicate-looking moss-made room divider, there is an apparent two-dimensional organizational aesthetic at work but, at the same time, there is an organic randomness as well as a tangible texture and depth across each surface – all part of an intentional interplay between nature and human design orchestrated by Japanese designers at Nendo.
These naturally beautiful green designs are set against stark white backgrounds to bring them out in sharp relief from their surroundings. Areas of denser moss on vertical surfaces also serve to compliment the horizontal fields of deep ocean blue carpeting throughout the spaces.
The architects call this project, fittingly enough, “Moss House.”
“This project involved renovating an old wooden house on the Shibuya River in Tokyo’s Ebisu neighbourhood into a live-work space. The house had accumulated some strange and wonderful features -an inner courtyard, an oddly long hallway, a tiny room- from a series of earlier renovations, so we decided to build on these earlier features, but also to ‘acclimate’ the space to the new owner’s lifestyle. The hallway became a study, and the small Japanese-style room a studio. Veins of moss pattern the riverbank outside the windows, so we used similar veins of dry moss on the interior walls to subtly connect existing spaces with newly-renovated ones, and the house’s interior environment to its exterior one.”
“Most wallpaper imitates nature through a two-dimensional representation of it, and cladding the walls entirely in moss would simply have been too much. We wanted something in-between, so we applied the moss in a pattern that looked like wallpaper, creating an ambiguous texture that’s neither artificial nor natural. The same pattern appears on the cable outlet, and on the doorframes and door handles of the office, further synthesizing the moss pattern with the space.”
