North Carolina furniture manufacturer Studio TK has introduced a new modular furniture collection incorporating structural panels made by Plantd, a materials company that produces engineered boards from perennial grasses as an alternative to conventional wood-based products.
The Clique Luxe collection uses Plantd’s pressed-grass panels as concealed structural components, replacing traditional oriented strand board (OSB) while maintaining compatibility with existing furniture manufacturing processes.
“Because it was carefully engineered to be a carbon-negative, drop-in substitution for standard OSB, it integrated seamlessly into our existing workflow,” Studio TK told Dezeen.
“It cuts effortlessly on our CNC machine and holds face staples, nails, and screws exceptionally well, requiring no modifications to our production or design processes.”
Following production trials, Studio TK said the material exceeded expectations in durability and manufacturing performance.
Grass-based panels target furniture and construction industries
Plantd manufactures its panels by rapidly compressing perennial, rapidly renewable grasses under heat, creating engineered boards designed to replace timber-based materials, including OSB. While the company has primarily focused on the construction sector, where OSB is widely used in timber-framed buildings, the collaboration with Studio TK demonstrates the material’s potential across furniture manufacturing.
“We’re not solving for capitalism like most startups,” Plantd co-founder Nathan Silvernail told Dezeen. “We’re solving for carbon.”
“We’re trying to reinvent lumber, and so in that case, we want anybody to buy this product that’s going to use timber-based lumber specifically, so that we can really expedite the amount of carbon that we can lock away,” he continued.
The company initially sourced wild grasses before establishing its own cultivation programme and now manages approximately 400 acres of perennial grass in North Carolina. According to Plantd, the crop grows rapidly while requiring significantly less land than conventional softwood forestry used for engineered wood products.
Material aims to expand beyond OSB applications
Although Plantd developed the panels as a substitute for OSB, the company believes the material could also replace engineered wood products such as medium-density fibreboard (MDF) and high-density fibreboard (HDF) across a broad range of manufacturing applications.
“They don’t have to go and source from three or four different lumber yards, manufacturers or suppliers. They can support one material from us, and then tackle all of their use cases across their furniture lines,” Silvernail said.
“We can be the supporting structure that you don’t see, we can be the laminated structure, we can be the routed structure.”
Studio TK also identified opportunities to broaden the material’s use throughout its product portfolio.
“Once you realize the potential of this material, the possibilities are wide-ranging. There are dozens of components in our current products where we could substitute with Plantd,” the company said.
“The biggest challenge will come from efforts to use the panels as a plywood replacement, as the two have some inherently different performance factors.”
The collaboration highlights growing interest in renewable, low-carbon alternatives to conventional engineered wood as furniture manufacturers and material innovators seek to reduce embodied carbon while maintaining industrial-scale production capabilities.