Philip Ross crafts furniture from mycelium Self-styled S.F. 'mycotect' crafts mushrooms into chairs - and that's just the beginning

Artist Phil Ross surrounded by some of his fungi furniture at The Workshop Residence in San Francisco, Calif., Saturday, October 13, 2012. Artist Phil Ross surrounded by some of his fungi furniture at The Workshop Residence in San Francisco, Calif., Saturday, October 13, 2012. Photo: Sarah Rice, Special To The Chronicle Photo: Sarah Rice, Special To The Chronicle Image 1 of / 15 Caption Close Philip Ross crafts furniture from mycelium 1 / 15 Back to Gallery

The house is filled with the earthy smell of mushrooms cooking. It's not a welcome-to-winter soup simmering or a ragout thickening; I'm baking a little mushroom footstool in the oven.

That's not all that's baking in that house, you may be thinking.

The footstool is the product of a furniture-making class taught by Philip Ross at the Workshop Residence in San Francisco's Dogpatch neighborhood midway through the fall. To call it a mushroom footstool is technically accurate, but slightly misleading - it comes out of the oven looking like weathered concrete and feels slightly spongy, like cork. Only the pungent smell gives away the footstool's nature.

Mushroom experts like Ross - they're known as mycologists - call what we buy in the grocery the "fruit" that grows atop mycelium, the often vast networks built by these fungal entities under the ground, or inside a host tree. It's this generally hidden network that Ross tends to use, at least when he has his furniture-maker hat on.

"It sounds like a joke, right, mushroom furniture, but actually it's a versatile building material with many attractive qualities," he says. Mycelium is fire-retardant, compostable, plastic, a good insulator, healthy for humans to be around, and as strong, structurally, as the concrete it resembles. "I've shot a handgun at one of these," he says, "and the network was strong enough to block the bullet - it only went in about 5 inches."

The 40ish transplanted New Yorker bears a striking resemblance to images I've seen of Edgar Allan Poe and wears several other hats. He teaches design at the University of San Francisco; he's an inventor - he has a patent pending for specially grown, treated and handled mycelium; he's an artist - galleries around the world have featured his furniture and the for-show-only pieces where he's allowed the shapes to fruit; and he's the world's only "mycotect" - he's built small structures from mycelium bricks.

Cleanliness a priority

He's also, as he reveals at the outset of the furniture-making class in the Dogpatch, a clean freak. "To prevent the mushrooms from being infected by the many, many germs we carry, it's necessary to develop nearly laboratory levels of cleanliness." Before the class begins, they've sanitized the central table and its surrounds and nearby walls with bleach, covered the table in plastic, and he continually spritzes his hands with alcohol solution and the surface with disinfectant cleansers. The fungi can easily be infected by germs - which then grow on its surface.

He generally works with reishi mushroom - he often sources from Far West Fungi, the mushroom seller with a branch in the Ferry Building - and lets it grow on red oak sawdust from mills in Northern California.

"They can grow on lots of things - sawdust, crushed pistachio nuts, corncobs, seed husks - often on waste material that would otherwise have no use and that the mushroom grower is paid to take off their hands," he says. "The resulting compound can be radically different depending on the nutrient. ... To make it lighter, you can put some perlite in the mix, let it grow around that."

Ross has a fantasy joke ad in mind for an all-organic furniture line. It features a motorist throwing old pieces out the window, littering with little danger to the environment.

Most of his furniture has wooden legs, all recycled from other objects, supporting the mycelium surface, to which it is attached by glue and bolts. Sitting on his chairs is much like sitting on leather upholstered furniture, and there's a welcome bit of give to them.

Curt Haney, the president of the Mycological Society of San Francisco, discovered Ross' work this fall, at the California Academy of Sciences' nighttime social on mushrooms. "I do think there's something to the use of mycelium as a building material," he says. Although there are no other self-styled mycotects, for the past five years, Ecovative, an upstate New York company, has manufactured mycelium as a green alternative to plastic foam, selling custom-made packing to major clients like Dell and Crate & Barrel.

Hands-on manufacture

We were instructed to shower just before the class, and to wear freshly laundered clothes. After cleaning our hands and arms, we take the moist sawdust with little white blobs and chunks of mycelium in it, and crush it with our fingers - "you prepare the cellulose the way it likes it to be for it to eat it, and then it digests it, and produces this different substance called chiton."

Then we jam the broken-up mixture into molds of the shape we want. For my footstool, I use a big plastic bucket. An accomplished potter has come to the class just to investigate the qualities of the material and plunges her strong hands into the mixture; a medical worker from Noe Valley has brought in a big mold, the shape of the stool he has in mind.

While we work, Ross points out breaches of cleanliness - "ABC, always be cleaning!" - and in the class elaborates on the mushrooms' key qualities, some practical, others slightly freaky. "You can use mycelium as an insulator - it keeps the heat in well. It will only catch fire at extremely high temperatures. ... Its spores can survive interstellar travel. ... The fungus can surround a rusty nail, and then, when it needs iron, break that down and transport it long distances to where it's needed. ... The compound when applied to cuts also activates the T-cells. ... I know, anyone who researches these fungi comes away feeling they're something else, from another place."

The city kid's interest in mushrooms began, he says, when he worked at a retreat in upstate New York, and on hikes, he'd notice them growing in forests. His interest increased after he moved to the Bay Area, when he worked in hospices during the AIDS crisis, because mushrooms were central remedies in the alternative therapies turned to by some people living with AIDS.

Toadstool to footstool

For a few days, Ross keeps the molds packed with the mycelium and the sawdust they're eating in a plastic-surrounded, humidified enclosure, with HEPA-filtered air. Ideal for growing the mycelium, it's a little like the famous bubble the germ-intolerant boy lived in, though not so tightly sealed. Instead, it's pressurized so that when you open the flaps, clean, wet air rushes out, rather than dry, germ-filled air rushing in.

Once the mycelium has assimilated the material it's given to eat - for my footstool, it took about four days - and the chiton is formed, low-level baking (at 180 degrees for three-plus hours) solidifies the piece, killing the fungus - the mycelium dies when it reaches an internal temperature of 150 degrees. At this point, Ross finishes his pieces using citrus oil and other essential oils to sanitize the surface, then applies linseed oil and shellac to preserve and protect it. This also largely eliminates the odor.

Or he'll forgo this process with his art pieces, allowing fruiting, and antlers to grow on the shapes - the antlers look exactly like what they sound like.

"The future is fungal," he says simply. "With some work, mycelium might be substituted where you might use plastic or polystyrene now, or it can be used as a strong, fire-resistant construction material. Their ability to uptake metals is ..." He stops himself, and laughs. "As you can tell, I could go on."

Fungi lingo Mushrooms have fascinated - and nourished and sometimes poisoned - humans for eons. "The remains of a caveman were recently found with mushrooms attached to his belt," Philip Ross says. "The Chinese have studied the mushroom and used the mushroom in medicine for 3,000 years." The Mycological Society of San Francisco ( www.mssf.org) promotes greater understanding of mushrooms, but information on mushrooms was not always easy to come by. "When I first started at this, it was pre-Internet," Ross recalls, "and most people who knew about mushrooms were so secretive." Ross' way into the field was through a writer named Paul Stamets. Still much consulted, one of Stamets' books, "Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World," puts scientific meat on the bones laid out by Ross in his class. With only an estimated 10 percent of mushroom species identified, there's much work yet to be done in the field of mycology. A would-be mycologist - or would-be maker of mushroom furniture - has some basic terminology to master. Chiton: A hard form produced by the mycelium when it digests cellulose. Curing: The process of baking the fungus to kill it so it can be used in furniture or as a building material. Fruiting: The part of the fungus that surfaces for the purpose of sending spores into the air. "If you get underneath them in the forest," Ross says, "sometimes you can see a mist of the spores coming out." Mycelium: The network underground or inside a tree on which the fungus is feeding. Mycotecture: The use of mushrooms in building - not a real word, not yet.