Here's another item I came across an ad for recently and which sufficiently intrigued me to check out their website: faux trees. Really nice faux trees. No, not an oxymoron. The company that makes them is called NatureMaker.
Turns out the guys who make the trees you would see inside Caesar's Palace or the Paris Casino (shown above) also make them for residential applications as well. I can't say I love every image in their gallery - let's face it, sometimes a tree inside a house is just strange and contrived - but I find them thought-provoking. I like to look at an item like this and think, "how could I make this cool? What could surround this item to make it look authentic and not just theme-y or like a stage set?"
My favorite image from their residential portfolio is shown both at the top of this post and here in another photo. The bleak, twisty Bristlecone Pine is 15' high by 15' in diameter, so you can imagine that the overall room is huge. I think the designer did a really good job. The tree looks like it blends well into this stark interior.
This image is of an exterior residential application - the beautiful faux Cypress columns are 32' high (!) and support the carriageway of a luxury home. The idea of the faux trees here makes sense to me - from an engineering standpoint, you can be sure they're made out of a strong enough material to bear this much weight, and you don't have to figure out where to source two matching real timbers to do the job.
NatureMaker seems to do quite a brisk business in restaurants. This one I found particularly pretty. It's an olive tree at Via Delizia Bistro in Portland, OR. The canopy is 27' wide and the height is 14'.
I had a lot of fun scrolling through NatureMaker's portfolio. What do you think?
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