The Plus, Vestre’s Newly Opened Furniture Factory, Raises the Bar for Sustainability

In 2020, when BIG revealed its plans for The Plus, Vestre’s new furniture manufacturing hub just outside Oslo, it was instantly polarizing. Here was a “factory in the forest,” a seeming contradiction for a project also touted as the most sustainable of its kind in the world. Two years later, as you drive down the winding, tree-lined roads of Magnor, Norway, the anticipation builds — a flashy billboard even proclaims the arrival of what resembles a UFO, a foreign object just landed on a verdant site. The fuss seems more suited to a tourist attraction than an industrial building, but it’s also not particularly surprising: Jan Christian Vestre, then CEO, proudly declared in his initial pitch to the municipality that The Plus would be a…