This Mumbai duo is crafting furniture from mushrooms

Imagine a world where, whenever you wanted a new chair for your office or lampshade for your bedroom, all you had to do was put together a pile of kitchen waste and watch it grow. Unfortunately, product design is nowhere near that level of elfin magic yet, but mycelium gets us relatively close. At least, that’s what it sounds like when Bhakti V Loonawat and Suyash Sawant, co-founders of Mumbai-based product design studio Anomalia, run through the list of products they have been developing using the thread-like mushroom root system.

So far, the duo has created partition systems for acoustics; a block that can hold 40 times its own weight; and a series of chairs that is part of an ongoing furniture series called MycoLiving, all using their material of choice—mycelium. And up next is a mycelium light fixture. “The light is growing right now,” Loonawat says, immediately inspiring visions of a futuristic wonderland where plants and humans live in symbiotic harmony.

Mycologists like Paul Stamets have long extolled the virtues of mushrooms, and this seems to have caught on in sustainability circles today, with everyone raving about the root system of mushrooms. In other good news, it is a renewable resource, it grows on waste, and it is a viable replacement for PU-based materials like foam and faux leather. An added bonus in a country like India is that large-scale mycelium manufacturing, which requires agricultural waste, could offer farmers an additional source of income and eliminate their dependence on crop burning. Already, the material has made a mark on the design world at large. Last year’s Belgian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale was clad in mycelium panels developed by biotech company PermaFungi, and a few months ago, Cadillac announced a collaboration with mycelium-focussed MycoWorks to develop the material for its car interiors. Fashion has responded on cue as well—with Stella McCartney’s Frayme Mylo™️ leading the charge and designing a designer bag made from mycelium. Anomalia, too, is collaborating with fashion designer Anushé Pirani on mycelium leather apparel that will soon be available for retail.

In India, companies such as Roha Biotech and Dharaksha Ecosolutions are spearheading the application of mycelium as a packaging material, while even companies like Dabur, Barosi, and Kraft Packaging are jumping on the bandwagon. And now, architects are investigating its potential as a structural material, in the hope that it could become the very fabric of our built environments. 

Will we one day be living in buildings that magically ‘grow’ out of old hay and sawdust? It turns out that’s exactly what Anomalia is hoping to explore through a fellowship with Godrej Design Lab. “We’re building a pavilion out of 300 of our blocks, interlocked and stacked,” explains Sawant. “Till now, people have seen mycelium in its capacity as a cladding material, but not as something that is under compression as a wall or a column system. That is what we are trying to do.” 

Loonawat and Sawant’s introduction to the material came in Barcelona, when they were pursuing their postgraduate degrees in architecture at the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia. “We were aware of mycelium as a material, but in Europe, we got a sense of how it could be put into practice,” Sawant recalls. The duo started experimenting with it during the lockdown, by growing mycelium in cupcake trays. Given that mycelium grows naturally on waste, it’s fairly low-maintenance, but even a minor bacterial contamination can alter the integrity of the substrate, and, consequently, its viability for architectural use. They now enlist biotech partners like Roha Biotech, and Indonesia’s MYCL Bio to grow mycelium for them in climate-controlled labs—in return, Anomalia’s design explorations offer these companies an opportunity to experiment with and develop new substrates that could revolutionise architecture. 

‘Sustainability’ is a buzzword that’s been floating around in architecture and design circles for a while now, but, like with every industry that’s driven by creation and consumption, it’s been hard to pin down what that really means. For some architects, it’s about using materials like cork or bamboo that can be sourced with minimal environmental impact; for others, it’s about going back to our pre-industrial roots and working with local artisans and indigenous materials; another school of thought focuses on maximising natural light and ventilation to reduce dependence on electricity. For Anomalia, it’s about being pragmatic.   “There’s a very thin line between actually being sustainable and greenwashing,” acknowledges Loonawat, “The idea is not to discard everything that exists and then replace that with mycelium, because that attitude is what is creating the waste. So, we’re looking at hybrids, where mycelium replaces parts of objects that currently use a material that is not good for the planet—like, say, foam or leather.” Mass production is a no-no, as is creating artificial waste just to grow more mycelium. “Just to create a recycled plastic board, you can’t produce more plastic,” says Sawant, “So we’re aiming to create consciously, within limits, using what we get from our farmers.” 

Alongside their practice, the duo is also currently teaching a course called Spawn Hybrids, about mycelium materials, at Mumbai’s LS Raheja School of Architecture, where they encourage students to apply the experiment methodology to other alternative materials like bioleathers, bioplastics, and algae. The students are currently prototyping a series of insulated, flat-pack biodegradable mycelium tents. “The idea behind teaching is also because the information about such materials is very limited, even for us,” shares Sawant. “We’d like to enable the architects of the future to start working with sustainable practices, instead of just thinking of it in terms of profitable business.”

Photograph by Bhushan Gavas, courtesy Godrej Design Lab

There’s a chance that mycelium’s unique properties—many of which are still under investigation—will encourage architects to reevaluate traditional building typologies and construction methods. “It may not replace conventional materials completely,” Loonawat cautions, “But we can start looking at hybrids and explore innovative building typologies that harmonise with nature. By working with mycelium, we are basically stepping into, and exploring, the unknown.”