Modern Brick Haus has been part of the BRICKA story since the beginning. Oliver Parr and the studio he co-founded with Gabe Villani appeared in Issue 1, in a feature called Curate to Create: Modern Brick Haus— a look at a design practice built around one important idea: a set should be the start of something rather than the end of it.
So when the studio asked us to make the Builders Guide for Pothos, their new brick-built houseplant, the partnership made immediate sense. Pothos is a unique set, and it needed unique instructions.
Pothos
The build begins with a pot — a terracotta vessel assembled from bricks and slopes, offset ring by offset ring, until a stack of angular pieces resolves into the familiar silhouette of a planter. It's dense and genuinely heavy in the hand. Beneath the terracotta shell there's a bright interior palette, flashes of yellow and red visible only to the person doing the building.
At the base sits an 8×8 modified plate with a grill, which means soil can drain, just like a real pot. You can fill the pot with soil and grow something living in it. Oliver did exactly that with the prototype and waited a full year to see whether the plant would survive. It did.
Or, of course, you can grow the plant from bricks. The mechanism is very small: a green modified plate with a toe-ball joint, chained into stems that bend and branch and hang the way real vines do under their own weight. Leaves are layered 1×2 rounded plates in several shades of green, attached at nodes anywhere along the vine.
"The toe ball joint is the star of the Pothos," Oliver says. "We're using it in a way that it's never really been used before."
The Builders Guide
Pothos doesn't end with one build of the set. The last steps hand the build over to you — your own vine lengths, your own leaf shapes, your own color rhythm. An instruction booklet that stopped at step 31 would stop in the wrong place. So we built the guide as a magazine that happens to contain instructions:
A written feature. Six pages on how Pothos came to be, from a house filling up with real plants to a prototype nobody was sure would hold soil. It runs the way a BRICKA feature runs, because it is one.
Photography by Hannah Dimmitt. Amazing photos of vines spilling across travertine, a watering can pouring into a brick pot, loose 1×1 elements scattered across the frame like actual soil.
Botany. An illustrated anatomy of a pothos — stem, leaf, node, leaf sheath, root — then the same diagram again in brick, each part mapped to the piece that performs it.
Premium Builders Soil. The loose 1×1 elements get their own recipe: 33% compost in dark brown, 25% potting soil in reddish brown, 17% pumice in white, 12.5% each orchid bark and charcoal. A fun, but real, explanation of what premium soil is made of.
An open ending. The final section is a kit of parts and approaches rather than a sequence — you can build any plant you want.
"The pot is the canvas," Oliver says. The Pothos Builders Guide is built to hold that idea.
Read Curate to Create: Modern Brick Haus →
Read Curate to Create: Pothos →
Shop Pothos at Modern Brick Haus →
