Jayna Roy wanted her newborn daughter to dream about mushrooms.
Since she couldn’t take her baby on picking trips, she decided to do the next best thing: turning the little girl’s room into a mushroom-themed country paradise. Roy designed the space to include more than a dozen mushroom-related items, including mushroom-dye colored crib sheets, a felt mushroom mobile, a stained glass mushroom ornament, and knobs for a mushroom-shaped dresser. fungus.
“Mushrooms are very adaptable and diverse,” said Roy, 31, who operates a metal design business in Pennsylvania. “They spark this sense of wonder in people, and I wanted to bring that into our home.”
Mushrooms are becoming more prominent in almost every aspect of modern life.
Lately, food, drink, fashion, medicine, and interior design have welcomed mushrooms — a trend that experts attribute to the rise of the collective knowledge about mushrooms. Even negative portrayals of fungi in pop culture have sometimes aroused interest, as in the case of HBO’s “The Last of Us,” in which a parasitic fungal infection turns people into zombies. Some fans were looking for the best mushroom snacks to make at gatherings to watch the broadcast.
In recent years, grocery stores have started selling mushroom teas and elixirs, and psilocybin therapy has taken off. Still, it’s not enough. We also sit on them, sleep on them, and decorate our homes with them.
Mushroom-inspired interior design objects range from the high-end (handcrafted lamps that sell for thousands of dollars) to the widely affordable ($18 cocktail glasses available on Amazon). The objects themselves can be related to mushrooms in a very literal sense, such as furniture made from mushroom leather.
“Mushrooms are having their moment in many layers of society,” said Paul Stamets, a well-known mycologist, who recently saw a new species of magic mushroom (which has hallucinogenic properties) named after him. Perhaps there is something innately human that draws us to fungi, due to their integral role in ecosystems.
“Mushrooms are a kind of interface between life and death, and their sudden appearance is startling, mysterious, arouses curiosity, and invites exploration,” Stamets said.
In East Asian countries, mushrooms have been regarded more laudably and are often seen as symbols of rebirth. The reishi mushroom, also known as the “mushroom of immortality,” has been revered in East Asian culture for thousands of years for its health benefits. Now, one can order a reishi cappuccino at Erewhon, a trendy health food store in Los Angeles.
It has been well documented that the lockdown caused by the pandemic made more people interested in interior design and the importance of the home as a space to reflect their tastes and desires. That, coupled with a growing love of mushrooms, has resulted in people filling kitchens, bedrooms, offices, and even bathrooms with mushroom-inspired furnishings and furnishings.
In 2021, millennial beauty brand Glossier opened a store in Seattle, Washington, featuring an Instagram-friendly, moss-covered sculpture sprouting colorful mushrooms as its centerpiece.
For those who make mushroom products, part of the appeal is that the shape of the common mushroom we all know—the pillar with a soft-edged cap—lends itself to versatile designs. It is simple, but emblematic.
When Tessa Gourin, a 28-year-old New York actress, took pottery classes, she discovered that mushrooms were an easy way to imitate. She made mushroom-shaped chandeliers, which were liked by Coming Soon, a home goods store in the City.
In 2017, Nicholas Bijan Pourfard, who had just started out as a furniture designer, began making handmade mushroom-shaped lamps with a ball-and-socket design that allows people to tilt the shade and direct the light however they like. Since then, he has sold hundreds of lamps, and they are now offered by luxury e-commerce site Ssense.
By: ANNA KODÉ
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6656065, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-04-11 22:40:07
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