Dunne & Raby / Michael Anastassiades

Weeds Aliens and Other Stories is a collection of psychological furniture for the home and garden. The project grew out of a deep dissatisfaction with the narrow range of psychological needs met by furniture. How many more chairs, tables and shelving units do we need in the world?

Weeds Aliens and Other Stories began as a sketchbook of drawings and ideas exploring the English obsession with the garden and seemingly irrational relationships between people and their plants. We wanted to encourage people to play out their eccentricities within their urban homes, homes with very little or no garden at all. These unacknowledged behaviours become legitimised through new types of furniture.

• Garden Horn: A device for speaking to plants that otherwise might be neglected.

• Meeting: A piece of indoor furniture to grow and look after; a place to meet and make up when lovers become neighbours.

• Talking Tabs: Labels for reciting poems or recipes to plants.

• Cricket Box: A drawer for collecting garden sounds.

• Intensive Care: Communication with demanding plants anywhere, anytime.

• Cucumber Table: A device for containing, growing, straigtening and displaying cucumbers.

• Rustling Branch: Sounds replace appearances; an alternative to the vase.

• Reserved: Seating to be shared with flowers.

Fabrication: Ben Legg
Technical advice: Rick Thomas, Mark Bullimore, Jon Rogers
Sound design: Jayne Roderick
Photography: Salvatore Vinci
Thanks to: Andr?e Cooke, The British Council Window Gallery Prague, Mark Daniels, Northern Architecture, Northern Arts, Sophie Smallhorn, Robin Blackledge, and Claire Catterall

The project is in the permanent collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.

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