Iain Little

Can we turn trees into furniture?

'Full Grown' simply grows trees directly into chairs, tables and bits of furniture without harming the planet. Iain Little, with his stepbrother Graham Lean, is in charge of Full Grown’s development. In the right hands, Full Grown could provide a new paradigm for how we live.

Little is Scottish, and has a wife, Mary Ann, and 3 children, Tom, Kate and Rosie. Little studied at Cambridge University, followed by a 36-year career in finance in Japan, China, Sub Saharan Africa and Switzerland. Iain started his love affair with ecology in the early ‘80s, when he founded the first privately financed 2.5 MW drop hydro project in the West of Scotland; this taught him that providing for the mating habits of black throated divers (Gavia Arctica) and migrant trout (Salmo Trutta) was every bit as challenging as meeting the demands of skeptical and innately conservative Highland rural communities. His other interests have been jatropha bio-fuel plantations in northwest Madagascar and, now, Full Grown. Full Grown caught his eye during a BBC broadcast in 2015 because of its unique intersection of the worlds of arboriculture, ecology, design and economic development, and the untamed imaginative genius of its founder, Gavin Munro.