TerraLiving

TerraLiving 180+ years of terrarium's heritage, redefined for modern living spaces through biomorphism & science.

What you are about to see is the culmination of excellence over years of hard work, coffee, and very little sleep. We are bridging our strong background in life science, art, and technology. Our love for all things beauty and our passion for perfecting our botanical collection & sculptures will be a great addition to your life. We are a team of scientists, designers, and nature lovers who would li

ke to share our passion and work. We observed simple, tiny yet abundant natural living plants, especially mosses, alongside other natural elements ranging from natural bio-architecture such as leaf arrangements to molecular-level phenomena such as protein folding structures. We are incredibly obsessed with the way mosses survive through hundreds of millions of years and waves of mass extinction. We aim to deliver one of the most remarkable survivors of evolution to connect with your life. Our ever-expanding knowledge of what we do allows us to design our very own glass sculpture to host our botanical art. We also work with organic designs through 3D printing to deliver one-of-a-kind artwork that you cannot find elsewhere.

“Reading”. The word we keep coming back to in the lab.Spending time in a place until you understand what it feels like t...
08/05/2026

“Reading”. The word we keep coming back to in the lab.

Spending time in a place until you understand what it feels like to be there. The rhythm of a hillside. How your eye moves across it and where it decides to rest. Then asking whether ZERO Moss (preserved moss) can carry any of that feeling into a glass vessel. We are trying to deliver such emotions in a physical form.

This ultra-wide Desktop Moss Wall is a reading of Malayan rainforest seen from above a ridge. Rolling hills built from fluffy moss mounds, with wood roots threading through where the canopy opens up.

It doesn’t try to look like a forest. The goal is closer to how it feels to stand above one. That’s a different thing from getting inspired by nature, or replicating it. Both of those stay with the visual. A reading goes after the feeling underneath.

Commentary: This is as far as I can go to describe how we really feel while we make these terrariums. Hopefully as time goes, we find better words to describe our thought process.

Most nights after everyone’s off work, I come back to the gallery to sit with the moss. The quiet rainy nights are my fa...
07/05/2026

Most nights after everyone’s off work, I come back to the gallery to sit with the moss. The quiet rainy nights are my favourite.

This piece is one of the many from our lab’s private collections, the ones we keep to study, not to ship. I mist them, then wait. The glass fogs up within minutes. Transpiration is the only thing happening in the room.

Shot these tonight because the light feels right.

The same species can look completely different depending on where it grows.Wild Pyrrhobryum sits under canopy shade with...
28/04/2026

The same species can look completely different depending on where it grows.

Wild Pyrrhobryum sits under canopy shade with constant air movement and cooler temperatures.

Our lab is a different story. The light source isn’t the same, there’s minimal airflow, and humidity stays relatively high. So the stems shoot up taller, leaves spread out wider, and eventually the whole form shifts enough that it stops looking like the same plant.

This is actually a common problem with moss. A lot of species get misidentified because the observer only ever saw one growth condition. Someone sees it in a forest, then spots something similar in a greenhouse. The morphology has changed enough that they assume two separate species. It’s not. Same organism, just responding to its environment.

We grow cultures in the lab partly because we like watching them develop. But the practical reasons are preservation and identification. We observe the same sample across different conditions over a few weeks, and we start building a reference that photos alone can’t give us.

What varies, what stays constant within a species, that’s what helps us archive correctly.

First image is a single Pyrrhobryum stem at macro magnification. Second is the live culture it came from in our lab.

Simple work. But it keeps the records accurate.

P.S.: Technical stuffs - Sorry for the distortion around some leaf blades due to challenges with multi-directional focus stacking of the moss.

Prepared in the lab, we then keep some live moss terrariums in our gallery. Some have been growing for over a few years ...
24/04/2026

Prepared in the lab, we then keep some live moss terrariums in our gallery. Some have been growing for over a few years now.

It sounds boring as most of the time we just watch them. Not because it is our job. We watch because things change and the process is therapeutic for us.

Moss does not stay the same. The stems branch, new growth comes in from the top, and the base also change over time. Colour shifts with moisture levels inside the glass. A terrarium you build in January does not look the same by June.

We work with preserved moss professionally. Preservation captures one moment. So we need to know which moment is worth capturing.

What does a healthy moss look like at three months versus six. When is branching dense enough to harvest or trim. At what stage does the colour hold best after preservation.

We don’t learn that from a reference photo. We learn it by watching the same micro-environment for months.

First image is a high macro magnification of single Hypnum sp. stem from one of our live moss terrariums. Second is the terrarium it came from.

One of the easiest ways to differentiate between real chlorophyll extract and synthetic dyes.Over time, even in preserve...
23/04/2026

One of the easiest ways to differentiate between real chlorophyll extract and synthetic dyes.

Over time, even in preserved extract, the magnesium ion gradually displaces from the centre of the ring. The porphyrin shell holds. It still absorbs visible light. It still looks green. But without the ion, the fluorescence pathway closes. The molecule can no longer convert UV into red emission.

Our preservation method stabilises the porphyrin ring structure itself by significantly reduces oxidation. That is what keeps the visible green intact for years after extraction. Most of the shell remains even when the ion eventually leaves.

21/04/2026

The Graviton - 01: Live Moss Experiment and Observation in our gallery.

We picked this off a fallen branch near the gallery.A piece of bark, about the length of your thumb. Under a macro lens,...
17/04/2026

We picked this off a fallen branch near the gallery.

A piece of bark, about the length of your thumb. Under a macro lens, there are at least three organisms sharing the surface. The large lobes are a foliose lichen, most likely Parmotrema sp. (correct me if I am wrong).

The powdery clusters sitting flat the bark are a different species entirely, a crustose lichen. And tucked sporadically around the gaps between both, tiny and subtle moss colonies.

Most people think lichen is a plant. It is not. It is a fungus and an algae living together in a structure that looks and behaves like a single organism, but technically is two.

The fungus forms the body, the lobes, the grip on the bark. The algae lives inside it and handles photosynthesis. On its own the fungus has no way to produce food. On its own the algae has no way to hold onto a tree. So they do it together, and the result is the thing you see growing on every old wall and fallen log in the tropics like Malaysia.

Then moss shows up and fills whatever space is left. Not fighting the lichen for territory, just staying in between the gaps while trapping humidity.

Nobody designed this arrangement. But if you look at it long enough, it starts to feel intentional by nature. Three organisms, three completely different approaches to surviving on a surface, and the result looks composed. Symbiosis.

We study these before we build anything. Not because we are trying to replicate it, but because it shows us how things organize themselves when nothing is directing them. That is the part we are interested in.

We extracted this from moss.No dyes. No food colouring. Just the chlorophyll that plants already produce, pulled out thr...
16/04/2026

We extracted this from moss.

No dyes. No food colouring. Just the chlorophyll that plants already produce, pulled out through a process we developed in our lab and stabilized so the colour holds against UV and ambient light over time.

By default, extracting the native chlorophyll is the first step in how we produce our ZERO Moss. If this pigment stays in the plant, it oxidizes and turns yellow over time, compromising whatever we do with the moss afterward. So we pull it out cleanly.

Usually after extraction, chlorophyll outside the leaf is unstable. It degrades fast. The extract itself was commonly viewed as a by product. But, we kept asking the same question. Can we stabilize this liquid and keep the green intact long after it leaves the plant?

We have spent the last seven years running stability tests on it, trying to hold the green against real world environment long enough for the liquid to become a material in its own right.

Preserved moss is what we have been known for. What’s inside it is what comes next.

06/04/2026

After a rough hand-sketch, glass render is usually the first official step in our bespoke design process for our clients.

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