MYCELIA HOUSE

A cultivation system to care for, grow and display mushrooms in your home.

As seen on design boom, dezeen, UNSW Luminocity Exhibition, Green Magazine issue 13, the 2020 IDES X Re-connect Exhibition, ‘Interdependence, Designing Relationships’ Exhibition at Milan Design Week 2024.

  • Mycelia House is a functional container that showcases the beauty of mushrooms and supports their growth within the home. This home cultivation system creates an ideal indoor environment for mushrooms to thrive, ensuring fresh air exchange, humidity retention, water application, and exposure to natural or low light.

    Mycelia House is designed to cultivate a variety of oyster mushrooms. These mushrooms are renowned for their nutritional and medicinal benefits, and they are also sustainable and regenerative to grow. The design draws inspiration from mushroom grow kits and the bucket growth method, which involve filling plastic bags or buckets with a mycelium-infused growth substrate, puncturing them with holes, and placing them in conditions for fruiting.

    Mushroom grow kits offer an accessible and engaging way for beginners to cultivate their own mushrooms at home, while also gaining insights into the circular economy.

  • Mycelia Houses aims to connect us with our innate nature - our human nature, through the display, caring for and nourishment of mushrooms as a living entity and as a food source.

    As naturalist Erin Verinder puts it “we are waking up from a long slumber of disconnectedness. Remembering that we are made up of the same materials as nature. There is simply no seperation.”.

    Mycelia House intends to imbue ritual, purpose into everyday life, through caring for and tending to the mushrooms.

    Mycelia House will contribute to a future where we grow our own food at home and this will evolve to growing locally within our communities. We envision a shift toward sustainable and regenerative food systems that prioritize quality, efficiency, and the well-being of both people and the planet, rather than profit.

  • Inner form - 3D printed terracotta ceramic pot

    Outer form - handblown glass dish and casing.

  • We live in a globalized world that has evolved to living in urban areas. Technology is advancing rapidly and with this we are desiring products we can connect with and emotionally relate to. The Covid 19 pandemic has had a ripple effect into the way we live and work, spending more time at home, as well as we are noticing and craving a deeper relationship with ourselves, the natural world and our daily routine. With trends arising in the localisation of food production and DIY alternatives, as well as a love for houseplants, the concept for mycelia houses has manifested. When we localise food, this leads to more sustainable and diverse food systems.

The Mycelia House design is currently in development thanks to the generous support of The Powerhouse Museum, in the Carl Nielsen Accelerator Program. You can read more here.

The Journey

This project started as my 2020 Industrial Design Honours Project whilst studying at the University of New South Wales.

The initial intention for this project wasn't to design a pot to grow mushrooms —it was to explore the applications of mycelium as a material within design.

In researching, I found many had negative associations towards fungi - often referred to as "gross, poisonous and infectious". These stories stem from generations of fear and a lack of knowledge about fungi. This presented a problem—

If I was to design a product using mycelium as the material, would it even be adopted by society?

Mycelia House is as much about changing the societal perceptions of fungi as it is about creating a functional, beautiful & simple product.

Fungi is beautiful. When we display them within our homes we watch them grow, we connect & we can attune ourselves to a more natural rhythm of life - one that is more sustainable.

—Caity Duffus, Designer

  • Paul Stamets is the Steve Jobs of Mycology, and I was deeply inspired by his TED Talk ‘How mushrooms can save the world’ where he goes into detail of all the potential uses for fungi and the essential role they play in our ecosystem. They are the hearts of our forests, connecting trees in a symbiotic relationship and holding all soils together. It is the largest living organism on our planet. Perhaps the most interesting thing about fungi is the microscopic hyphae, known as mycelium - and the way they connect and communicate with all of life. As humans there’s a lot we can learn from their way of being.

    Fungi offers many potential applications for sustainable futures - as a material (furniture, packaging, clothing), food source (to nourish), medicinal (eg reishi for anxiety, lions mane to strengthen neural pathways, psilocybin for deep inner transformation), acknowledging ancient cultures & their wisdom, and an ability to break down waste (in landfills and toxins in our waterways).

    “What a beautiful inspirational model for how human beings might live: In a shared economy based not on greed but on nurturing relationships and mutual cooperation.”

    ― Paul Stamets, Fantastic Fungi

GLASSMAKING PROCESS WITH Rob Wynne.