New in my neighborhood, a block and a half from my house (up Ramona St. at Hamilton Ave., in a corner space that housed, for years, a Radio Shack, then a succession of short-lived retail enterprises): inhabiture home, an earnest green home furnishings store, that
features beautiful reclaimed and recycled, non-toxic, organic, and locally-produced home accessories and furniture. inhabiture home takes pride in providing healthy furnishings, sustainably produced.
The name is a somewhat grandiose portmanteau, of inhabit and furniture (with, maybe, echoes of nature and architecture thrown in). The merchandise includes both hand-crafted items and stylishly antique odds and ends of no great utility:
The entrance to the store is on Hamilton. Around the corner, on Ramona, is the entrance to design and construction offices for the company. And out on Ramona there’s a vertical garden on the wall. Two different sorts of vertical gardens illustrated:
(Agapanthus growing in front of this one.)
(Succulents galore.)
I worry some about the little vertical garden: it’s right out on the street, along a narrow sidewalk, in a neighborhood with a fair amount of foot traffic, including people wending their way home from the bars — many of them given to littering, some to vandalizing the street plantings by homes and businesses.
Vertical gardens are a way of using precious urban and domestic space, but they’re also ways of softening hard, lifeless, blank surfaces, turning them into bits of living green that surround us. (It’s hard to avoid falling into the inhabiture frame of mind when talking about these things.)
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