Hirshfield's Design Studio makes a concerted effort to locate and incorporate into our selection products that not only meet our design criteria but also offer our customers environmentally-friendly, green and sustainable alternatives.

You'll find a variety of green products in our showroom: furniture, wallcoverings and accessories. We are particulaly happy to represent Maria Yee and her eco-friendly designs.

Maria Yee's Bamboo Timbre™

As part of Maria Yee's vision for greener living, she spent years researching and developing an alternative to solid hardwood for quality furniture making. The result is her patent-pending BambooTimbre™, invented for the production of EcoLuxury™ home furnishings.

BambooTimbre is made by a proprietary process of layering and bonding flattened bamboo culms, or stalks, in defined patterns to create boards as thick as 8 inches. Bamboo is one of the fastest growing renewable resources in the world and its extensive root system is excellent for erosion control. While hardwood can take up to 60 years or more to mature, our bamboo is harvested in a five-year cycle. It also regenerates new growth from the original clump - replenishing itself with virtually no negative impact on the environment.

Maria Yee's BambooTimbre exceeds steel in tensile strength, yet is pliable enough to be shaped into beautiful forms. Unlike most other materials, BambooTimbre actually feels warmer in winter and cooler in summer.

Maria Yee's dedication to safeguarding the environment extends even to the adhesives, which meet worldwide industry standards for indoor air quality. BambooTimbre releases no harmful chemicals into the atmosphere.

(you may access Maria Yee's website through our Products/Furniture tab)

The demand for “green” is extending beyond light bulbs and low-VOC paint and into the world of luxury interior design. More and more people want to live in high style while in harmony with the Earth. While more consumers seek out luxury with a conscience, retailers, like Hirshfield’s Design Studio, are steadily increasing eco-friendly offerings. Below are just a handful of examples of eco-chic products from Hirshfield’s Design Studio.

Floor
You can find the finest quality wool rug that is ecologically responsible. If you order a carpet from the Masland Mill in Australia, it can be as “green” as carpet can get. No dye is used on the wool, so your color choice will be determined by type of sheep. And depending on what the sheep were eating that season, you could see a slight variation in tone. The carpet is backed mostly with jute, reducing dramatically the amount of latex needed.

Read about the green "wool" effort established in New Zealand where the sheep outnumber people 13 to 1 here.

Wall
Bamboo flooring and cabinets are all the rage, but interior designers are discovering its beauty as a wallcovering. With wallpaper making a strong comeback in the design world, bamboo offers an eco-friendly option for high-end design.

Phillip Jeffries Ltd. is just one line of high-quality wallcoverings. Phillip Jeffries Wall Bamboo Forest is made from authentic bamboo tambour and is fabric backed and sold by panel rather than yard. Woven Bamboo, an innovative collection of natural textured wallcoverings, adds textural drama to walls. Harvested from the seasonal growth of natural bamboo and accented by other natural fibers such as jute, hemp and dried palm leaves, the Woven Bamboo collection offers seven exotic yet sophisticated textures for the walls.

Furniture
With exclusive retail rights to Maria Yee Inc. furniture, Hirshfield’s Design Studio offers homeowners access to its EcoLuxury™ furniture.

The leather is vegetable-tanned leather from the finest hides. Vegetable tannin is extracted from natural plant materials to convert rawhide into leather. Its use eliminates heavy metals, such as chromium, commonly used in the tanning process. The solid hardwood is responsibly grown and harvested and artisans shape the materials into beautiful works of art using pure joinery—no nails or screws.

Beyond the eco-friendly materials used, Maria Yee voluntarily administers the highest standards to its production practices, making them among the most environmentally friendly in today’s manufacturing platforms. For example, instead of fossil fuels, sawdust is recycled to fuel the company’s low-emission boilers.

“Green” down to the details
One example of how eco-friendly high-end interior design can get is a set of accessory bowls from one of the uniqe finds at Hirshfield's Design Studio. The bowls are made of horn, but only horn that was harvested from the ground after it naturally fell off of the animal.