Scaling is the name of the game in today’s bioeconomy. Yet functionality and cost efficiency are not the only things biomaterials offer.
Renewable materials are also opening up new possibilities in luxury design. We look at the makers experimenting with natural materials for style-conscious markets that insist on aesthetic value along with sustainability and performance.
Nature Squared
The most innovative biomaterials producers enhance simple biological feedstocks using processing techniques that create something not-quite-natural but perfectly fit for function. This is the case with Nature Squared, the last word in the biobased luxury market.
Founded in 2000 by Paul Hoeve and Lay Koon Tan, the company has eclectic material tastes. Nature Squared’s raw material portfolio is a raucous mix of shapes and textures ranging from the relatively familiar, such as rattan, to the exotic (at least for Western consumers), such as ostrich egg.
With a tagline of ‘transforming waste into luxury’, the company scours the world for renewable byproducts that might be used for luxury interior and craft applications. Many of the raw materials Nature Squared uses couples durability and renewability with beguiling colours and textures, including grasses, seeds, bark, shells, and feathers from all over the world.
Nature Squared’s sales pitch is that it improves on both nature and traditional crafts, combining artisanal techniques with European technologies and tools. Turning natural raw materials, often waste, into high-quality bespoke interior items requires a large-scale technical effort and the company’s R&D process happens across Barcelona, London, Hong Kong and Cebu, involving teams of artisans, engineers and chemists.
Building with eggshells
Nature Squared’s riff on egg inlay, an East Asian craft, neatly embodies its waste-to-luxury ethic. Borrowing heavily from artisanal inlay work, Nature Squared developed a new process for turning waste shells into a multi-faceted design and construction material.
Turning waste eggshells into luxury material is a careful process. The materials are collected from businesses across Asia, such as bakeries. Nature Squared then meticulously cleans the shells, sorting them into sizes for use in different designs.
Once clean and prepared, there are two main routes for the eggshells. In one, the shells can be ground down to very specific sizes.Once mixed with other ingredients, the shells can be cast, for example, to form tiles. The second route turns the shells into a decorative embellishment. In one design, eggs can be shattered in precise ways to convincingly replicate the pattern of snakeskin.
Nature Squared says it is as committed to supply chain ethics as it is to sustainability. It is certified both to ISO 14001 and ISO 45001, the international standards for determining environmental impact and for occupational health and safety management systems.
Sustainable colour
Biobased luxury needs sustainable sources of colour. The development of biobased dyes is all the rage in the sustainable materials space and Bristol’s Botanical Inks, founded by Babs Behan, is a well-established specialist.
In a world dominated by commodity production, the luxury sector hangs on its ability to offer products unique to a particular time and place. This aligns with founder Babs Behan’s philosophy, which is that her dyes and inks should express its unique ‘bio-region’ in the South West of England.
What Behan’s emphasis on bio-regionality means in practice is that the raw materials for her pigments are drawn predominantly from the local area, cutting down air miles and making for a product embedded in a unique soil and climate. Feedstock for the dyes are nearby plant materials grown without harmful synthetic chemicals. Organic garden produce and recycled food and farm waste also feature. The bio-regional ethos extends to the textiles that the company applies its dyes to, including wool from the Mendips and cashmere from a holistic Devon farm.
The company offers small and large-scale dying services for designers and brands. However, Botanical Inks’ stringent ‘soil-to-soil’ approach means they are highly selective when it comes to choosing client projects. It only works with materials that use 100% natural fibres cultivated and processed without harmful synthetics, regardless of client preferences.
Any material it dyes also has to have been sourced as locally as possible, whether from Britain itself or from the continent. Alternatively, it is open to working with locally produced recycled fabrics. By imposing this strict set of criteria on client work, Botanical Inks is attempting to leverage change through the whole textile supply chain.
These exacting standards are not putting off clients, however, with many big names in British design having worked with Botanical Inks, including the Saatchi Gallery, the Tate, Jo Malone, V&A, and more.
Colouring with nanostructures
Fashion is delving deep into the possibilities of natural materials to achieve entirely novel kinds of textile colour. Structural Colour Studio’s paradigmatic idea that material nanostructures rather than pigments can colour the clothes of the future could drive a sea-change in the way we approach luxury construction.
The brainchild of designer Noora Yau, fashion designer Anna Semi, and scientist Konrad Klockars, Structural Colour Studio has been developing what it calls ‘Shimmering Wood Crystals’, precision-printed wood crystals whose physical structure scatters light in particular ways that force the human eyes to see specific colours. This gets rid of the need to use toxic mineral pigments and even pigments altogether to achieve colour and sheen, opening new design avenues in biobased luxury.
Natural luxury
A growing part of the biobased luxury world specialises in turning hemp fibre into all manner of interior objects. Among them are Foersom & Hiort-Lorenzen, household names in the world of Scandinavian design.
In 2024, their collaboration with Danish furniture brand Normann Copenhagen launched a hemp-based chair range that takes classic modernist furnishing and upgrades it for a more environmentally conscious client.
Their ‘Mat’ chair range consists of a simple, curved seat crafted from a special composite made from hemp fibre and dried eelgrass composite. The biobased mix is made through a process of shredding, milling, and compression. According to Foersom & Hiort-Lorenzen, the material was 20 years in the making.
Then there is Materials Assemble, pioneering a semi-industrial process to make custom furniture from hemp. Their material is unique because it consists of 90% hemp bound with mycelium, the branched vegetative body of fungi. The resulting material is eminently pliable, meaning that it offers a strong alternative to oil-based furnishing materials such as EPS, EPP, or polyurethane foams.
Brands and designers are increasingly interested in mycelium and fungi for their binding ability: their ability to smother filler materials and solidify into any shape. Just like Materials Assemble, designer Sebastian Cox has discovered that mycelium is a high-performing ‘medium’ that can solidify around low value materials like wood waste and give them new life. In his MYCELIUM+TIMBER collection, he infused scrap willow wood with fungal strains, forming them into stools and lamp shades.
Similarly, fifth-generation luxury furniture maker Ligne Roset has also been exploring the uses of mycelium, incorporating fungal leather made by MycoWorks into their furniture design.
The most successful biobased luxury design companies, including in the mycelium space, are those leaning into the unique physical properties afforded by natural material and making a product that would be difficult to make using fossil inputs. The luxury fungi leather space today is dominated by the brand Ephea, which sells its soft mycelium leather replicas not as an animal leather replacement but ‘a set of products setting a new standard’ in material design.
Biobased embellishments
Decorative elements in fashion have a bad rep for sustainability. Sequin and glitter made from oil are a known environmental pollutant. Non-recyclable beads end up in landfills. Yet consumers and designers alike are still mesmerised by the colours and shimmering effects that oil-based synthetics offer.
Now, biobased embellishments could give luxury fashion designers alternatives. Chief among them is Cellsense, a company set up by New York-based designer Aradhita Parasrampuria in 2022. It specialises in making beautiful objects from natural ingredients, primarily cellulose and algae.
The company’s most remarkable product is its bioluminescent algae-cellulose bead that can be woven into textiles for outfits that quite literally light up a room. Cellsense’s innovation is a masterclass in how natural materials can not just offer a less polluting product but can also expand creative choices in ways that fossil chemicals cannot.
Following Cellsense’s lead, more luxury fashion designers could turn to the magic of synbio in order to push against design boundaries. This fusion between apparel and synbio is likelier today given the growing backlash against fossil-based fast fashion among certain markets.
Although historically one of the worst contributors to the climate crisis, the clothing sector could become an ideal incubator for new biomaterials. With a consumer base that thirsts for aesthetic novelty while increasingly baulking at the industry’s impacts, the ideas being hatched today in the luxury sector could drive material innovations and cultural shifts that help lighten fashion’s load.