Instead of having plain white shelving, when NatureArch Studio were designing this home office in Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam, they added an extra detail to the built-in bookshelves. Boxes in black, yellow and white, were included as a way to show off little sculptures, and also act as bookends.
I would be a happy camper to work in an office like this. Unfortunately, I'm a messy worker and it would not look like this for very long. If you're still alive there's always hope for change. We'll see when I get back to the East Coast in the spring. I will use these photos as motivation and inspiration.
Notice the glass bowl with the Pothos cuttings growing in it. This is the simplest form of hydroponics I know of and a great way to teach kids.
Your grandma (or your great-grandma) may have done the same thing using the kitchen windowsill. She just didn't have a name for it. Certainly not hydroponics. If there were clay pebbles in the bowl it would be called hydroculture.
I kept a row of clear hydro planters like this on the floor in front of light gardens in my Brooklyn plant lab. The planters were recycled UTZ pretzel containers (see photo below).
This is the most maintenance free form of houseplant growing that I know. "Stamp collector" type growers might be bored with Pothos and Spider Plants but they are very user friendly. Try others. What have you got to lose?
Plants need light, water and oxygen. How do you supply oxygen to these cuttings? The simple answer is to let the water level lower to 1/3 to 1/2 the volume of the planter. Don't be diligent about adding watering to them. Topping them off too often will starve them of oxygen leading to their demise
I almost forgot nutrients. My practice is to always add some liquid fertilizer to the water when growing houseplants. This is basic hydroponics practice to create a "nutrient solution". I use Dyna-Gro Foliage-Pro 9-3-6 (1/4 tsp. to each 1/2 gallon plastic milk or juice container I use to store the solution).
When the plants need pruning (as soon as they reach the table top or floor), cut the vine ends or plantlets and stick them back into the planter. The plants will then keep increasing their fullness. There is always room for one more cutting.
Please overlook the grubby quality of the plants and surroundings in this photo. These plants had just traveled about 3,000 miles in a pitch-dark U-Haul truck. Then the plant lab was in temporary storage here in San Diego. What a mess.
All of the plants were extremely lush and healthy with very strong root systems before the move. I do not recall why I added decorative stones to the Spider Plant container. I never bothered to photograph them since they were somewhat of a catchall for cuttings that I hated to throw away.
I had to dump these plants because of a shortage of space here in San Diego but plan to do more experimentation with this method. It is such a simple way to add the design element of living plants as in the office project above. It is a virtually hassle free method of growing indoor plants.