Growing Up in Brooklyn
The French botanist Patrick Blanc has caused a stir over the last three years by cloaking the walls of prominent Paris locations, including the Pershing Hall Hotel and the Musée du Quai Branly, with vertical gardens of living vegetation.
I was unaware of anything comparable in New York until last night when I went to the opening of a bar, called Oulu, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where Marni Horwitz, a New York representative of Green Living Technologies, has covered the façade in a pleasingly shaggy tapestry of succulents.
“People are shocked when they see it,” Marni told me.
The succulents are planted in 35 or so panels of soil, each less than three inches thick, which are screwed to the wall. A hidden watering system gives them a steady spritz.
A living wall can easily be planted on a residential façade, Marni says, at a cost of about $50 a square foot. Interior walls are roughly $30 more per square foot because they contain tropical plants, which are more expensive.
The living wall at Oulu was the idea of Evangeline Dennie, the bar’s designer, who had previously worked on the visitor’s center at Ground Zero. The bar is named after a coastal town in northern Finland, and Evangeline has covered the rear wall with a photo mural of the town and lined one wall with panels of cherry designed to look like bark peeling of a birch tree.
I’m looking forward to swinging by Oulu in the fall, when the succulents will have turned a reddish maroon color.
I was unaware of anything comparable in New York until last night when I went to the opening of a bar, called Oulu, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where Marni Horwitz, a New York representative of Green Living Technologies, has covered the façade in a pleasingly shaggy tapestry of succulents.
“People are shocked when they see it,” Marni told me.
The succulents are planted in 35 or so panels of soil, each less than three inches thick, which are screwed to the wall. A hidden watering system gives them a steady spritz.
A living wall can easily be planted on a residential façade, Marni says, at a cost of about $50 a square foot. Interior walls are roughly $30 more per square foot because they contain tropical plants, which are more expensive.
The living wall at Oulu was the idea of Evangeline Dennie, the bar’s designer, who had previously worked on the visitor’s center at Ground Zero. The bar is named after a coastal town in northern Finland, and Evangeline has covered the rear wall with a photo mural of the town and lined one wall with panels of cherry designed to look like bark peeling of a birch tree.
I’m looking forward to swinging by Oulu in the fall, when the succulents will have turned a reddish maroon color.
Posted by: Michael Cannell on Aug 17, 07 at 04:01 PM PDT
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