Foresso makes “timber terrazzo” with waste material
Reframe talks with Conor Taylor of Foresso, a company based in Birmingham, UK, that is harnessing the power of composite. From counters to tiles, the company makes surfaces with wood, cement and plaster waste, all held together by bio-based resin.
Taylor started developing Foresso in 2016 while working in a carpentry workshop in London. “Before long I was quoting for jobs much too big for me to make. I then met my now business partner Jake Solomon who was manufacturing resin panels from his workshop in Welwyn Garden City. After much debate about the future of manufacturing and working together to continue developing Foresso over the course of about a year and a half, we decided to go into business together. We moved the workshop to Birmingham in late 2018 and have been here since.”
BC: We love your work… it’s a mix of old-school and modernism. What’s the making process like?
CT: We make the chips ourselves in-house and cast them directly onto the plywood substrate. It is then sanded to reveal the wood chips before being finished by hand. We seal it with a natural hardwax oil for most projects, and a commercial-grade lacquer for more demanding applications.
BC: What do you think is the most promising technology that the industry should adopt more broadly?
CT: Glu-lam and other cross-laminated and composite timber products.
These new timber products are by far the lesser evil when compared with the concrete and steel usually used for these purposes. These are also readily available to projects of all sizes and don't require loads of effort to put into place. Most other technologies are at too small a scale right now but there are lots of good things happening.
BC: Can you tell us a little about why you founded Foresso?
CT: I started Foresso as a reaction against the wasteful and disposable culture common in a lot of design projects. It seemed to me that there is not enough transparency in most companies and products to allow the customer to make an informed decision.
“Sustainability is often presented as this thing of 100% perfection but actually it’s lots of grey areas.”
Terrazzo is also fascinating to me because of its combination of manufactured surface and natural materials. It has a really interesting history as a material originally made from waste so it seemed like a natural thing to explore.
BC: Some people think “sustainability” isn’t the right word because it’s so vague and used for almost everything, but there are no easy alternatives. What do you think?
CT: The best thing you can do is try to make informed choices and steadily improve them. No choice will be perfect and we face this all the time in our work. Sustainability is often presented as this thing of 100% perfection but actually it's lots of grey areas. Our policy is to "choose the lesser evil", and over time, we'll get somewhere good. Until then we do our best to communicate clearly what we are doing and why. I think our customers really appreciate this since we are all bombarded by marketing about sustainability, even when it's obvious greenwashing.
BC: What’s the one major thing you think has to happen right now to further efforts in sustainable design?
CT: We're at a tipping point where the awareness of sustainability is at an all-time high but very large companies–the ones big enough to have a real impact–are not engaging with it seriously. There will come a point where the construction industry will have to be significantly disrupted for any nation to reach its net-zero goals.
The pressure for this change can and should come from customers, designers, specifiers, and companies of all sizes who are willing.
BC: What are you currently working on?
CT: We're working on some ranges of ready-made products like tabletops, furniture, and the like. We want to make sustainable materials more accessible to a wider range of people and offer products that are made as locally as possible. Alongside this, it's a huge task scaling up production. We've doubled in size in the past year, and it's not looking like it's slowing down so we're hard at work every day improving things in the factory here in Birmingham.
