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MilkWeed: Greening Your Modern (mini) Home

I have a new obsession, perhaps stemming from architecture school and years of making my designs in small scale, but lately I’m so obsessed with everything miniature and it’s uncontrollable. I had-it-bad to begin with, but I may be hitting the creepy stage if you ask my office mates. The recent spike can be attributed to the awesome Emily Henderson, as I’m participating in the I’m a Giant! Dollhouse Competition alongside other design bloggers like Erin Loechner from Design from Mankind (check out her recent tile floor that I would kill for in my own real house!). But the above miniature home by artist Krista Peel literally gave me a mini green thumb as she includes plants in all her work. I got to thinking…wouldn’t it be better if they were REAL (no plastic here please) PLANTS? Real MINIATURE plants? And better yet…in MODERN PLANTERS? No run-of-the-mill ceramic pots will do. The challenge was on as I’m always searching for cool modern ways to make my own or my clients real home’s incorporate plants. So why not make a few of my favorites? I give you… the Mini Wall Wally modeled after the Wally Woolly Pocket and a few more modern design mini knock-offs!

Mini planters have a tendency to fall over, get in the way of big hands – so why not eliminate the hassle of putting your plants on the ground and hang them on your mini walls? No nails required – just some double stick tape does the job just fine. I found a DIY pattern online and built my version at 1:12 scale. Insert a few mini air plants and it’s ready to go!

And with my mini-walls why not have green from above? In my own home, I’ve been wanting to find a place for the Boskke Sky Planters. Getting them in my mini-home has been so much easier to commit, not to mention install.

Installation? I’ll leave it up my guy to lend a (little) hand. But my competition dollhouse is in the works, and I don’t really have finished walls to adorn or even really a roof overhead, so I need modern planters I can move around. After an exhaustive search, my final choice was this one below but I needed to nix the sharp corners as I’ve got a mini-baby in the dollhouse. Never too early to baby-proof, right?

The mini-version so makes me smile. And I can’t keep saying how CUTE it is to literally everyone who stops by my studio.

If you’ve caught the mini-bug too, join in! There’s still plenty of time to participate or just follow along Emily’s blog for updates on the entire crowd. There’s some amazing rooms coming together – like this one from WhiteOwlFound:

Or this chair from The Brick House that I’ll take two of in me-size, please:

Cute ‘n gorgeous. But maybe better with a bit of modern green, no? If you’d like to add any of my pieces to your own mini (or big) world, I’ll be putting the modern minis above and a few other pieces in my Etsy shop until the Dollhouse Challenge is over mid-December. Maybe I’ll just make a greenhouse instead of a home? Stay tuned.

Kara Bartelt is a design strategist in practice at kara b. studio. Kara enjoys the design process on all scales via her architectural practice, Lettuce Office, or by creating botanical art with air plants, via toHOLD. She wishes at 11:11 each day at thisiskarab.tumblr.com. Kara writes the Design Milk column, MilkWeed.