Hyacinth design

Why choose Water Hyacinth?
It’s durability and simplicity along with its natural look and organic texture attracts the interests of interior designers and architects the world over.

What is Water Hyacinth?
Water Hyacinth (Eichhornia Crassipes) is a tropical floating plant that grows in the waterways of South East Asia. Also referred to as the ‘golden plant’ in Thailand it grows in dense clumps and can double in volume in around 2 weeks – forming a dense mat across water surfaces.

How is Water Hyacinth made into furniture
Yothaka pride themselves in creating very high quality furniture which means they handle the Water Hyacinth in a specific way. The furniture is made in a 5 stage production process which undoubtedly produces the best results.

Stage 1 – It is harvested by the villagers around our factory and dried naturally in the sun for several days – this is critical to the strength of the finished product.

Stage 2 – The stems from 3 plants are then plaited to form a braid. Each stem is around 80 centimetres long, which means when the braids are woven into furniture there are no joins.

Stage 3 – The braids are then either immersed for 24 hours into dye for the chocolate/charcoal colourways or left unstained for the natural colourway. The immersion of the braids into the dye allows the dye to penetrate the water hyacinth giving it a beautiful depth of permanent colour.

Stage 4 – The dyed braids are then allowed to dry naturally in the Thai sun.

Stage 5 – The braids are then woven onto the hardwood or cane frames that form the basis of our furniture. All the hardwoods used in our frames come fromsustainable sourcesmanaged by Yothaka.

Our Factory
Yothaka has been established since 1989 and now employs over 200 workers and over 1000 local villagers working to collect the water hyacinth from the waterways. Our factory supports these workers by providing them and their families with opticians, doctors and valuable schooling. Our factory consumes over 8000 kilometres of water hyacinth in its braided form each year – this is almost enough to stretch from our factory in Thailand to our warehouse here in the UK!

Hyacinth Design and the Environment
Not only is our furniture environmentally friendly, our packaging recycled and our brochures and literature printed on FSC approved paper but since July 2009 the electricity used at our Hertfordshire warehouse is generated by an on-site wind turbine.