IKEA garden sphere: free plans for a sustainable garden

BY: SAMANTHA TAPP

Photos via The Growroom

IKEA just released free plans for a sustainable garden and it’s beautiful.

It’s probably safe to say that you or someone you know have IKEA furniture in your home. If you have had the pleasure of building any of the Swedish company’s furniture, then you’ve felt the overwhelming frustration, but also the sweet feeling of success once finished. Well, now you can use your IKEA skills and use them for something better than a new desk.

Last Thursday, Space10, an IKEA lab, used for futuristic, sustainable designs released the plans for The Growroom, which is a big, multi-tiered spherical garden. The garden has the ability to grow enough food for an entire neighbourhood. IKEA is hoping to empower local food growing. To help turn this plan into action, Space10 made the plans free for everyone.

“Local food represents a serious alternative to the global food model,” Space10’s press release reads. “It reduces food miles, our pressure on the environment, and educates our children of where food actually comes from…the challenge is that traditional farming takes up a lot of space and space is a scarce resource in our urban environments.”

These are all the pieces you need to build your sustainable garden:

Designed by Space10 and architects Sine Lindholm and Mads-Ulrik Husum, the garden is designed for cities to combat the space issue. The garden is 2.8 x 2.5 metres in size, and since it grows vertically it can be built essentially anywhere. All you need to make your dream garden is the downloadable plans, plywood, rubber hammers, metal screws and most likely some patience.

The IKEA garden was designed so that ordinary people would have the ability to build their own eco-garden.

“The Growroom…is designed to support our everyday sense of well being in the cities by creating a small oasis or ‘pause’ architecture in our high paced societal scenery, and enables people to connect with nature as we smell and taste the abundance of herbs and plants,” the press release reads. “The pavilion, built as a sphere, can stand freely in any context and points in a direction of expanding contemporary and shared architecture.”