A champion of urban biodiversity – bringing the outdoors inside

Milan Design Week showcase for Vestre Habitats collection.

To welcome sustainable Scandinavian outdoor-furniture brand Vestre back to the forefront of the international design stage, We have created an immersive experience that will bring the beauty of nature into the urban heart of Zona Tortona.

Our installation has been devised to introduce Vestre’s new Habitats collection – an experimental family of outdoor furniture and other smaller pieces designed to seamlessly integrate with the nature that surrounds them. By serving humans, animals and flora equally, the pieces offer a template for furniture that works in harmony with the landscape, rather than being simply imposed on it – a new category of furniture that is both visually and functionally connected to its surroundings. The concept for Habitats has been developed in collaboration with René Hougaard, the designer and architect behind ARDE, and Alexander Qual, design director of Rethink Studio.

To reflect Vestre’s vision of ecological sustainability, our studio developed the concept of a biodiverse utopia that visitors could – not just look at – but physically enter into and explore.

Vestre is introducing Habitats during this year’s fair – a beautiful utopian idea where design plays an important role in promoting biodiversity in urban spaces. We wanted to physically manifest this utopia, not only to inform the visitors, but to have them experience it. Small details such as shape, colour or the exact form can be easy to forget as time passes by, but how certain events and situations make us feel is something people never forget. Lukas Petko / Note        

 A one-way path winds through the venue on Via Tortona, taking visitors from a display of Vestre furniture in the courtyard into an interior area, where curving brick walls conceal an enclosed area at the heart of the space, a walled garden accessed and exited through narrow, corridor-like openings.

Inside, visitors are met with an explosion of greenery, where the Habitats collection is woven into an edenic landscape of trees, plants and flowers. Bringing the outdoors inside, the installation acts as a physical manifestation of the concept behind the Habitats collection – the idea that humanity and nature can coexist in balance and synergy. 

Thanks to the curve of the walls, and the bend of the path, there are no clear sight lines throughout the space, just glimpses of what might lie ahead – glimmers of light through the gaps in bricks – which creates a sense of curiosity and intrigue, an incentive to keep pushing on through the installation and discovering what’s coming next. The stand becomes a journey

More than just a showcase for sustainability

Vestre’s trailblazing sustainability ethos is reflected in our decision to reuse and recycle as much of the installation materials as possible. The 596 porotherm bricks that make up the interior walls, as well as loose marble gravel and the sheets of acrylic and plywood from which the installation is built, were first used in our stand for Vestre at Stockholm Furniture Fair 2020, which won the festival’s award for best stand, largely thanks to its strong sustainability focus. 

Now, those materials are being recombined in the service of a completely different stand design, supplemented by as few additional materials as possible. To minimise environmental impact, these will be obtained either from Vestre’s own stores, or sourced locally, and rented in preference to purchased.

After the exhibition, all components will be returned, recycled or reused as much as possible. This is more than a showcase about sustainability, but one that puts environmentally conscious principles into practice.

We used the space outside the walled garden to showcase pieces from several other recent Vestre collections. The area outside the venue will feature the Note-designed modular outdoor-seating system, Plinth, which launched earlier this year. Our first product design for Vestre, Plinth is the result of the studio’s exploration of how we interact with – and in – outdoor space, and is designed to be flexible enough to support our changing behaviours as attitudes and social norms shift.

Inside, around the perimeter, other Vestre pieces exhibited include: the circular Stripes bench and planter; the colourful Pop collection of furniture, greens and planters; and the DOGA-award-winning Munch Collection of seating that Andreas Engesvik and Jonas Ravlo Stokke designed for the new Munch Museum that opened in Oslo last year.

2021 is the third year in which We and Vestre have been in partnership. Through previous collaborations at major international design fairs, and the launch of the Plinth product line, the two companies have built a strong relationship built on shared curiosity, mutual trust and unfettered creative scope.