Built DIY grass wall behind my desk to get relaxed

Takuya Matsuyama
Carefully Cut Corners
3 min readSep 5, 2019

Hi, it’s Takuya.

As I’ve written about my productive desk environment, a view from the room is not great because there is an apartment, unfortunately. There are basically only my desk and chair in the room and I felt like kinda boring. I sometimes get nervous and irritated when I’m struggling or things aren’t going well while working here. I found myself that I need something that I can avoid doing bad habits like eating a lot or watching YouTube to get rid of my stress.

Linus Torvalds, the Linux developer, changed the wall color to light green in order to get relaxed while working. Greenery lets you ease, even if it is artificial plant. I actually feel healed when I put an artificial plant in the room:

I put it in the kitchen now BTW.

One day, I suddenly came up with an idea that it would be very comfortable if I put a grass on the wall. I felt good when I saw something like that at some offices. So I bought an artificial grass on Amazon right away.
I also bought imitation vine leaves.

It smelled chemical when opened but it disappeared after a few days. It is made quite well in spite of the fact that it costs only 7,000 JPY (66 USD). Looks like it is usually used for hiding a yard of the house by putting it on a hedge but it is no problem with using it in rooms.

Turned over and connected them with the joints in a row.

Then, tie up the stick to them as a framework so that they won’t collapse.

And here is the result:

I’m so satisfied with that. I’ve got it just as imagined.

It’s hard to know that it is actually artificial from a distance. If you look at it closely, you can see the texture of vinyl, but I usually don’t bother to see it.

Now I see the plants all the time while working. I sometimes look at the lawn during breaks. It is unconscious, but it feels quite healed.

And also I wrapped the vine leaves around the kitchen pendant light.

It look good! Artificial plants are nice because they do not require to care. Of course, the ideal is surrounded by real greenery, but you won’t be able to go on a long trip. I would like to live in a location with good landscape in the near future. Overall, I like it :)

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Takuya Matsuyama
Carefully Cut Corners

I’m an indie SaaS developer currently building a Markdown note-taking app called Inkdrop. https://www.inkdrop.app/ Homepage: https://www.craftz.dog/