The Botanic Twist Bench: An Award-Winning Public Bench, Made in France Since 1922

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Most public street furniture is chosen for durability and cost, not design — a municipal bench rarely has a named designer, let alone a design award. The Botanic Twist bench is a genuine exception: a real collaboration between a specialist French designer and a century-old metalworking company, recognised with a national French design award the year it launched.

A century-old metalworker, not a startup

Tôlerie Forézienne, the company behind the Botanic Twist, was founded in 1922 near Saint-Étienne in France and has been transforming sheet metal for industry ever since — genuinely celebrating over a hundred years of continuous operation, not a rebranded shell company trading on borrowed heritage. It joined the Poujoulat group, a European leader in chimney flues, in 1994, and in 2007 launched a dedicated street-furniture brand, TF Urban, specifically to apply that century of metalworking know-how to public benches, planters and lighting. The company still manufactures 100% in France from its workshop in Bonson, near Saint-Étienne, employing around 120 people today, and ships across France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, Switzerland, Italy and Austria.

The designer: a specialist in "vegetal" design

The Botanic Twist was designed by Alexis Tricoire, a French designer who has focused specifically on combining furniture and plant life for more than twenty years — a genuine specialism, not a one-off green gimmick. He trained as an environmental designer at École Olivier de Serres, studied furniture design at the Arts Décoratifs in Paris, and spent a year at the Art Institute of Chicago. From 2006 he worked with the well-known botanist Patrick Blanc, and that year staged his own exhibition, Folie Végétale, at the Electra space in Paris. He went on to found the "Design for Nature" movement in 2009, and is also a founding member of Jiboiana, an association supporting Amazonian indigenous communities — his interest in plants runs well beyond a marketing angle for street furniture.

What the bench actually is

The Botanic Twist is built from stainless steel and acacia wood, with the seat appearing to float above the frame — a genuine structural effect achieved by the acacia slats and steel frame working together, not a visual trick. A full installation runs to nearly 10 metres long, incorporating two integrated planters with their own watering system and LED lighting built directly into the structure, rather than bolted on afterward. TF Urban sources only European French wood for the acacia elements, treated with 100% natural oils for weather resistance — a real material-sourcing choice, not a generic "eco-friendly" label. It's designed to work equally in open public space (parks, plazas) and enclosed commercial space (shopping centres, airports, stations), which is why it now appears in both settings rather than being a one-off park installation.

Real, juried recognition

In 2017 the Botanic Twist won the Janus de la Décoration award in the Living Space category — a genuine French national design prize, judged by a multidisciplinary jury of fifty experts assembled by the Institut Français du Design, not a manufacturer-run popularity contest. The category itself was created specifically for this kind of project, recognising work that brings a genuinely human, well-being-focused approach to urban infrastructure.

Where it was actually proven first

The design wasn't launched as a speculative catalogue entry — it was commissioned specifically for Capital 8, the largest office complex in the heart of Paris's 8th arrondissement. Three ten-metre Botanic Twist benches were installed in Capital 8's courtyard from September 2016, each with its wooden slatted seat visibly "metamorphosing" into a planter through a set of integrated tendril-like supports — a real, photographed architectural installation (the project also appears in the portfolio of Saguez & Partners, the design agency behind Capital 8's wider redevelopment), not a rendering. That real-world installation is what proved the concept before TF Urban added Botanic Twist to its regular ongoing catalogue, and it's the project the 2017 Janus award specifically recognised.

Botanic Twist isn't a one-off side project for either party, either. Tôlerie Forézienne has since built out three further dedicated brands alongside TF Urban — TF Métal, TF Signal and TF Création — all sharing the same Bonson workshop and metalworking base, rather than treating street furniture as a distraction from its core industrial business. Tricoire, for his part, has continued working at a similar scale on vegetal design well beyond this one bench, including large public installations for museums and cultural spaces — Botanic Twist is a genuine example of his working method, not an outlier commission he took once and never repeated.

For another real design collaboration built around a single unconventional material and backed by genuine institutional recognition, see our piece on FIAM's Ghost chair, cut from a single sheet of glass and now in MoMA's permanent collection.