By Sarah Laskow
SOMETIMES, IF YOU’RE LUCKY, YOU stumble across corner of the world that immediately captures your imagination. Last summer, when I got into the world of tree shaping—the practice of coaxing trees into sculptures and structures, useful and otherwise—I wanted to know everything I could about it. Eventually, I visited and wrote about a small company in England, Full Grown, that is working to grow an entire forest of chairs, tables, and other furniture. But a small mystery remained, one that I couldn’t let go of: What happened to the original “Chair That Grew,” the first chair coaxed from growing trees?
The first person to mention this chair to me was Richard Reames, author of Arborsculpture, who practiced tree shaping for many years. In the first decade of the 20th century, he said, a man named John Krubsack started to grow a chair.
It required 32 trees and 11 years, but his quixotic idea worked, and eventually, in 1914, he harvested it.* “That chair went on to the World’s Fair—it was the chair that lived,” Reames said. “He was the first known person to grow a successful chair.”
Later, I came across the chair again: Full Grown’s founder, Gavin Munro, keeps a picture of it in their office. I found an entry on it, too, in Atlas Obscura’s collection of unusual places. But there I learned a troubling fact.
The chair seemed to have been lost: “‘The Chair That Grew’ was last seen at the entrance of Noritage Furniture, owned by Krubsack’s descendants, Steve and Dennis Krubsack. The store recently closed, and the fate of the chair is unknown.” Click here for the rest of the story...
