Greenworks celebrate 10 years of big and small projects erecting vertical gardens in- and outdoors. The new showroom, located at the city square Östermalmstorg in the midst of Stockholm, sports big windows filled with lush greenery, and just around the corner awaits a flowering wall that capture everyone passing by.
’Our new office and showroom is a green library,’ says Emma Norman while showing the walls in a celadon color and the terrazzo floor made with stones shifting in ochre, emerald, and different shades of white, which complement an interior brewing with plants.
The colors allude to the nearby Hedvig Eleonora church where the roof sections all tend toward green verdigris. Some 50 different species of plants are present in the showroom where the public part for seminars, workshops with architects and education is quite lush and wild. The office is more restricted, to show a different approach to the use of greenery. The conference room is furnished with vintage furniture, Piet Hein’s super ellipse table in curly birch and Arne Jacobsen’s Seven chair clad in aged leather. Greenworks’ pendant light Babylone, designed by Alexis Tricoire, adds even more greenery to the big windows facing Storgatan and Östermalmstorg. The walls as well as the window plants are as present in the daytime as at dusk thanks to the Philips Signify lights. Their color and intensity can be regulated and is an invitation to discuss the concept Human Centric Lighting: how our bodies react to different kind of light.
’We have had plenty of visitors knocking on our door asking about our outdoor vertical garden,’ muses Greenworks’ founder Per Berglund and shows the first part of hopefully an even larger green wall on the gable wall. ’We can add green space to the cityscape by cladding facades with plants,’ adds Per’s colleague Emma Norman. ’We avoid the problem with tags to be cleaned away regularly. Our housing co-op is all in and now dreams about filling the inner court-yard with plants.’
The Stockholm Beauty Council, an advisory council of the Stockholm Municipality concerned with the beauty of our Northern Venice, were a bit skeptic about vertical outdoor gardens in the beginning. They now seem to have come to appreciate Greenworks’ proposals. Greenworks nurture the hope to cover the entire gable wall many storeys up with a luxuriant green garden.
Jens Öqvist, landscape engineer at Greenworks, explains that the wall has a meticulously thought through composition. There are lots of spring bulbs here and in the early summer chinese wisteria will bloom together with different varieties of rhododendrons.
– The lavender is still decorative in autumn, and then we have lady’s mantle, orpine, purple coneflower, and it seems like the roses will be left alone now; they were very popular as gifts for some time. Next step is maybe to plant something edible. Sure, there are thymus but strawberries for example is worth considering.