Martha Stewart Is Bringing Back This 200-Year-Old Decor Trend (It’s So Classic!)

Knowing her love of gardening, it’s no surprise that Martha Stewart takes any opportunity she can get to bring a bit of the outdoors inside. And in an entryway in her home in Maine, she uses a nearly 200-year-old method to do so. It’s called faux bois — French for “false wood” — and it’s sculptural concrete that’s crafted in a way to look like petrified wood.

“I have the most beautiful house in Maine,” Stewart captioned an Instagram post from late July. “My gardeners are planting the faux bois woodland vignettes. Moss from the woods. Seedling evergreens from the forest. So evocative and provocative.”

The faux bois planter in her entryway looks like an extension of the seedling planted in it. It’s carved to look like a gnarled tree trunk, and this is just one of the many faux bois pieces Stewart has in her Skylands home.

Although it has French roots, the craft of faux bois migrated to Argentina, then up through Mexico and further into Texas. Carlos Cortés is a San Antonio faux bois (or trabajo rustico — “rustic work” — as he calls it) artist who specializes in the technique and has made several pieces for Stewart’s Skylands. 

Cortés layers concrete onto rebar and mesh armatures and then hand-carves the wood grain and detail into the concrete before it dries. The result is something that looks like it came from the ground.

As she wrote in a blog post, Stewart also collects faux bois from antique and garden stores, where she’s picked up the majority of her faux bois chairs, planters, benches, and settees. 

If you want to bring a bit of nature into your home with faux bois, you now know what to look for! Keep your eyes peeled for these pieces while you’re secondhand shopping and start a faux bois collection in your own version of Skylands.