Daily Archives: July 31, 2013

Green Decor: Flexible Cork Bowls from Bambu Home share

Who says you can't stay organized and have cute, green decor options at the same time? Not this gal!

Ever since having my baby back in March, I've been all about decluttering and organizing our house. My husband has made countless trips to Goodwill as we get rid of our tchotchkes, and I've been working on decorating with and organizing what's left. It's made our house feel a lot bigger and makes it so much easier to keep things tidy!

One method that's helped me a lot is using baskets and decorative boxes in bookshelves as hidden or semi-hidden storage. When the folks at Bambu Home offered to send me one of their new cork bowls to review, it gave me some green decor ideas!

Green Decor: Cork

Cork is a great material for designing all manner of green decor options. Much like bamboo, cork grows quickly and doesn't require a lot of water or pesticides to grow. That makes it much more sustainable than wood or paper, and of course it's leaps and bounds better than plastic. Cork forests also help preserve biodiversity, which in this age of monocropping is more important than ever!

These bowls aren't meant to be used as storage, but when I unwrapped my sample bowl a couple of weeks ago, I knew it would be wasted in my kitchen. It looks handy for serving, but we have serving dishes up the wazoo already. What we didn't have was something to wrangle my son's toys in the living room, and this bowl was the absolutely perfect size!

See how nice it looks loaded with persimmons? That is a product shot from the company, showing one of the ways you can use these bowls in the kitchen. The bowls are water- and stain-resistant, and you can wash them with the rest of your laundry. As you can see, since they're flexible you can fold the sides down to make them as shallow or deep as you need.

Because the bowl is flexible, it's also great for home decor and storage! We have one of those Ikea bookcases that's made of cubes in the living room, and the bowl fits easily into one of the cubes with room left over to stash a few books. The lighting in my living room is not super ideal, so I mocked up this storage situation to give you an idea of how I've been using my cork bowl.

Since the bowl is machine-washable, I can toss it in the wash along with the blanket and toys that I'm storing in there, which is great! My son has just reached a serious drooling phase, so all of his stuff gets gross pretty quickly. I also could probably fit one more book on that shelf, because the flexible bowl conforms somewhat to the area where you fit it.

You can find these cork bowls and Bambu Home's full line of products on their website. I poked around a little bit while I was working on this review and stumbled upon these super rad, colorful cutting boards that may just have to become part of my kitchen!