Fancy some woven seaweed furniture?

Fancy some woven seaweed furniture?

Of all things that you can list for the making of new age, eco-conscious furniture, seaweed would be the last. And yet, Dutch designer Nienke Hoogvliet has used precisely that for her furniture collection that highlights the possibilities of seaweed. The Sea Me collection features a seat made from fabric that has been woven by hand using seaweed yarn, among other items dyed or finished with the algae. The fabric on the seat, which Hoogvliet has spent the last two years developing, is created using cellulose extracted from kelp. It has similar properties to that of viscose – a compound used in synthetic textiles – but with much softer fibres. Hoogvliet also used seaweed to dye the fabric, with different types creating different colours. The chair and table are supported by a simple, bent tubular steel framework in a soft grey-green. She used leftover materials from furniture production to create a pair of bioplastic bowls made from 100 per cent seaweed. Hoogvliet first experimented with algae yarn in a rug which featured strands of kelp that had been wrapped and knotted around a fishing net. The designer believes that people in the future could actually create and live in houses made entirely of seaweed too! And before you dismiss that idea as too outlandish, chew on this: architecture studio Vandkunsten is already putting her ideas to test by stuffing seaweed into netted bags and using it as cladding for a timber-framed holiday home on a Danish island.