Three interiors growing textiles into space

Against that mineral backdrop hang Dasha Tsapenko’s curtains: loose, shaggy fields of hemp and coconut fibre carrying irregular white growth of polypore mycelium. Their surfaces refuse uniformity. Fungal matter gathers into soft crusts and tufts in some areas, while elsewhere, woven net remains exposed. Tsapenko produced seven pieces by inoculating the fibres with spores and allowing them to develop for three weeks. Six assume the loose silhouettes of outerwear and sheepskin coats, introducing something bodily into the architecture.

Their instability is also what gives them force. Weaving establishes the framework; biological growth completes it according to its own rhythm. Hung between the dining areas, the pieces divide space while carrying the restaurant’s mushroom narrative into an element usually expected to be soft, regular and repeatable. Against travertine and plaster they appear somewhat feral – porous, fibrous and unevenly colonized – allowing cultivation to remain legible in the finished space.

Across the glazing hang translucent sheets of seaweed biotextile, pigmented with reishi mushroom and clay. Tiny pockets of air are caught inside the material, breaking its surface into bubbles, cloudy blooms and uneven passages of transparency. Daylight further activates those irregularities. Amber areas deepen, paler passages turn almost milky and the material shifts between membrane, sediment and skin as light moves across it. Paired with hemp fabric, the panels slide in front of the windows, shading the interior while creating a soft backdrop for the displays.

That delicacy sits within a denser experiment in circular material use. Reishi mycelium is grown into plinths and furniture legs, cork becomes storage and reclaimed travertine retains the geometry of its original slabs. Seaweed panels draw those materials together at the threshold, where biological pigment, trapped air and daylight turn the shop window into an atmospheric surface. Circularity acquires a tactile vocabulary: rough, cellular, translucent, grainy and softly lit from behind.

Some of that matter has already passed through the restaurant once. Kelp recovered from miso soup and algae left from food preparation return in another form, appearing in the lighting and the noren that hang through the space. The dividers reveal another behaviour in Procel. Gravity takes over: sheets overlap, edges shift and glimpses of the room open and close with movement around them. Kitchen waste returns as something atmospheric and architectural, circulating through the restaurant as light, colour and surface. The ecological loop remains visible in the material itself, where traces of the ingredients persist as pigment, pattern and texture long after their original use has ended.