Herbarium · Four B&O speakers
Everything wild, in order.
A herbarium is a meadow taken apart and laid out flat — each stem given its own space, nothing overlapping. Herbarium is a watercolour of that — cornflower, wild carrot, nigella gone to seed — printed as speaker covers for four Bang & Olufsen models.
The original, at actual size — the paper grain is part of the print
I · The pattern
Somebody had to flatten a meadow before anyone could study one.
Luca Ghini, a botany professor at Bologna, was the first to press a plant and fix it to a sheet, in the 1540s. He called it a hortus siccus — a dry garden.
Two centuries later Linnaeus stopped binding the sheets into books. Loose in a cabinet, they could be pulled out, compared and put back somewhere else. The order stopped being fixed — and every herbarium still works that way. A sheet is never only a plant. It is a plant, plus a decision about where it goes.
II · The species
Two field weeds and a garden escape, on the same sheet.
Cornflower
Centaurea cyanus
Common enough in European corn fields to give English a colour word. Herbicides then took it out of those fields almost entirely.
Thomé, 1885
Wild carrot
Daucus carota
Ancestor of every carrot in the shop, and the source of the white umbels here. One dark floret usually sits dead in the centre of the head.
Thomé, 1885
Love-in-a-mist
Nigella damascena
In English gardens since the sixteenth century. The flower is brief; the seed pod behind it lasts months.
Edwards, 1787
Botanical plates: Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
Stems crossing at angles that were chosen, not found
Wild is easy. Wild that reads as deliberate is the hard part.
Beoplay A9 — 70 cm across, and the first thing the room says
III · The garden
Gardeners spent a decade going wild. This year they started arranging it.
Naturalistic planting came back at Chelsea in 2026 noticeably more curated — matrix and mosaic planting, layered drifts, woodland-edge schemes. The free-for-all wildflower meadow had run its course. Herbarium sits on that line: meadow species, but stems cross at chosen angles and the paper is left to show through. A meadow somebody has been through.
Beosound Shape — two tiles in the print, the rest in sage and cream
IV · The colour
Grey is leaving, and it is taking cold white with it.
The 2026 forecasts agree on two moves: muted greens — sage, olive, moss — replacing the cooler hues of the last cycle, and warm off-whites replacing pure white. Herbarium is built on both. The ground keeps the grain of paper rather than going flat white, and the greens run olive to sage. On the Shape it is meant to be mixed with plain tiles, so the print reads as part of a palette.
Beosound Level — kitchen in the morning, terrace by six
Beolab 8 — at this size you can see the brushwork
V · The fit
Fitted, not glued.
Each cover is cut to the geometry of its speaker and fitted over the original front, which comes off and goes back in the box. Nothing is modified, nothing is thrown away. The fabric is acoustically transparent — it sits between the driver and the room without being heard.
Designed in Munich. Free worldwide shipping.
Herbarium, in fifteen seconds.
Painted flat on paper, then wrapped around something seventy centimetres across.
The edition · four speakers
Every design for each model: Beoplay A9 covers · Beosound Level covers · Beosound Shape covers · Beolab 8 covers
Bring your own, with Tegrino Designer.
Every cover here started as a file. Yours can too — upload an image, or a single colour, and we cut it to the same geometry, for any Bang & Olufsen speaker we make for.
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