When brutalism meets botany 

Since 2018, Olivia Broome has been curating an Instagram feed in a palette of grey and green. Under the handle @brutalistplants, she posts images of concrete structures teeming with plant life, from rows of balcony gardens to monuments coated with moss. Now compiled in a photo book (Brutalist Plants, Hoxton Mini Press), the project has a fanbase that delights in every monochromatic block and wayward tendril. 

It’s a contrast of colour and texture that also appeals inside the home. Architects, interior designers and furniture makers are increasingly drawing on an industrial-botanical mix. Chang Architects’ Cornwall Gardens in Singapore sees trees twist up through an internal courtyard, while vines curtain the concrete ledges. “We are all living in cities for the most part,” says Broome, “so greening the spaces we have is a real joy.” 

For Jenni Lee, founder of luxury loungewear label Comme Si, plants are integral to a relaxing home. Her recent collaboration with Swiss modular furniture company USM seeks to “achieve harmony between the natural and the manufactured”, adding greenery to the brand’s metal units, as well as semi-sheer panels created by fusing Italian linen with glass. The organic materials soften the industrial system, says Lee, while USM’s signature steel “modernises” the traditional Korean hanok architecture from which she drew inspiration. 

Lee’s Platform for Relaxation (POA) is based on a pyeong sang – “it’s this outdoor platform where people eat, sit and relax, and family gathers,” she says. To replicate the experience indoors, a warped pine emerges from the centre, creating a leafy canopy. The Reading Wall (POA), Lee’s “dream bookshelf”, features integrated planters and a cosy central nook. (There is also an accompanying collection of socks, boxer shorts and shirts in USM colours, available from £37.)

We are all living in cities for the most part so greening the spaces we have is a real joy

Panoptikum Collections’ Greenhouse range is similarly utilitarian in shape – though more surreal in effect. The white cabinet and black sideboard (both POA) feature circular perforations through which foliage can emerge, as well as a subtle glow from the phyto-lighting inside. The rationale for incorporating plants was not only aesthetic, but based on the host of benefits for city-dwellers, from mental health to air quality. With its Mushrooms collection, the Ukrainian studio has found another way to bring the outside in: dried, varnished polypore fungi from the Carpathian mountains are a colourful counterpoint to minimalist black hardware on the lamp, table and cabinet (POA). 

The humble pot plant has also undergone a brutalist twist: Montreal-based designer David Umemoto makes architectural planters from hand-poured concrete (from £101). His influences range from Le Corbusier to old grain silos and pre-Columbian monuments, but he was particularly drawn to Las Pozas, a surrealist concrete playground in the Mexican rainforest created by British poet Edward James. The fragility of the plants against the solidity of the concrete struck him most. “I also liked the idea that nature will overcome and eventually start to degrade the objects,” he says, “that nature will prevail in the end.” 

Broome shares his sentiment. “Throw in a gravity-defying shrub, a reaching evergreen, some fanned foliage,” she writes in her introduction, “and the harshness of béton brut is instantly softened: reminded that its home is our green planet, its purpose to serve society.”