We know that Christmas is long gone (although the weather might convince us otherwise), but this January at SemiDomesticated, we talked a lot amongst ourselves about the sad state of post-Christmas evergreens — so when we came across this project, we were relieved to see that someone else shares our compassion for these lost creatures. I know we’re personifying here, but how would you feel if you were taken out of your natural habitat, celebrated and decorated with gold, lights and glitter for a couple of weeks, to then be thrown out in the gutter to wither away? Talk about fifteen minutes of fame!
Fabien Capello makes stools, benches and side tables from old Christmas trees gathered from the streets of London, where 1.8 million trees are left on the streets to wither every year. (We’re wondering how many tons of wood we waste annually, worldwide on this ritual). Capello doesn’t talk much about the process of making the furniture on his site, but we love the technique he uses to join discs cut from the tree stems together. The legs are beautifully hand carved, and often bark and is left on the furniture as a reminder of what it once was.
By rescuing and utilizing these discarded trees, Fabien is doing more than making beautiful furniture from found wood, he is initializing a very important and necessary discourse about this, in our opinion, obscure tradition.