Sustainable interior materials - NUO wood

Sustainable materials for interior design - NUO wood veneer

What makes a sustainable material?

We specify healthy materials in an interiors fit-out for green buildings, focusing particularly closely on flooring, wall coverings and furniture.

This strategy incorporates elements of sustainability, biophilic design and healthy interiors to ensure that the materials going into a space are non-toxic, do not off-gas over time and will therefore not have a negative impact on Indoor Air Quality.

We specialise in sourcing circular economy, upcycled and marine- or plant-based materials for healthy interiors as well as sustainably sourced natural classics such as bamboo, wood, cork and rubber.

Inevitably, there are often some hard choices to be made, no material in our buildings has zero impact on the environment once we factor in production and transport but there is now a world of options that do far less harm than you might think and indeed some such as upcycled and Circular Economy materials that are genuinely doing good, either for the planet or the people it comes into contact with when in use.

Is leather a sustainable material?

We have covered the debate around leather justifiably being called a sustainable material elsewhere (see our podcast here with Moore & Giles leather), the argument goes that it is a byproduct of the colossal meat industry anyway and no cattle are raised and killed just for their leather.

When tanned in a certain way, for example using a byproduct of the olive industry, rather than the toxic chemicals that are usually involved in this process, we think this is a fine solution for high-end interiors - our problem is the low-end, mass market end of the spectrum, that is where things have gone badly wrong.

It remains a delicate subject and in an ideal world real natural leather would be a prestige fabric coming only from the few pasture reared, grass-fed and chemical-free cattle that had lived long, healthy lives in nature, once the world’s consumers had given up on their addiction to cheap, low quality beef. Therein lies the problem.

The new sustainable materials NUO wood

So. while we wait for scientifically grown meat to develop into a viable alternative, we look to a range of leather-life fabrics and materials that can supplement our creative resource library.

Here we will look at NUO a German made newcomer on the sustainable material scene that uses sustainably sourced wood.

Their timber logs are cross-cut, debarked and steamed, then processed into veneer sheets of 2.5m x 1.5m dimensions,. These sheets then have a fabric glued to the back before the real magic happens when the wood is laser cut with a fine engraving like detail detail to create a soft material with the flexibility and malleability of leather.

What can this sustainable material be used for?

Whenever a fabric has been proven for use in the automobile industry, we know that it can handle hospitality uses, residential or indeed luxury yachts. That is the case with NUO as it has been used in door panels and seat shells as a ‘soft wood’.

As sustainably sourced wood is one of the best natural materials available to us as sustainable interior designers, we are especially pleased to see that NUO appear to be working with the utmost respect for the forests their raw material comes from. This is key. Get that wrong and it is hard to argue in favour of real sustainable material credentials.

NUO also has some interesting acoustic qualities, it is fire protection class B1 and adapts well to upholstery uses in sustainable interior design projects.

Contact us to discuss your sustainable material project with us.