Wooden modular furniture system with shelves and a plant in an office setting

About Us

We make wooden furniture
that happens to grow food.

Aquager started in a workshop at the Illinois Institute of Technology in 2021. Today we hand-build wooden hydroponic home farms in small batches, assemble them in Chicago, and ship them flat-packed to kitchens, apartments, and dining rooms across the country.

Person kneeling next to a wooden indoor garden system with plants.

The first Aquager Home Farm was a plywood box with three LED grow lights zip-tied to the inside, built in a corner of IIT's Kaplan Institute in 2021. The original idea was commercial: a vertical hydroponic system for restaurants and small farms.

A year of customer discovery later, the idea didn't survive contact with reality. The people who actually wanted fresh herbs and greens weren't restaurants — they were home cooks. People in apartments. People who'd killed every basil plant they'd ever brought home from the supermarket. People who wanted a real garden and didn't have a backyard, a green thumb, or thirty minutes a day to spare.

We pivoted. The new version had to be small enough to fit in a city kitchen, simple enough to use without an app, and good-looking enough to live in a room — not a basement. We refined the design through a second accelerator at Kaplan in 2023 and Future Founders Bootcamp in 2024. We tested prototypes in real homes for over a year.

In May 2025 we manufactured the 300th Home Farm and the 200th matching Storage Unit. Every one of them was built by hand, in small batches, and assembled in our workshop in Chicago.

Four things we won't compromise on.

1

A farm should look like furniture, not a gadget.
We don't make plastic appliances. Every Home Farm is built from real wood, hand-finished, and designed to live in a room you actually spend time in.

2

Growing food at home should take 10 minutes a week.
Not 10 hours, not a daily routine, not a learning curve. Add water once a week. The lights run on a built-in timer. That's the whole job.

3

"Beginner-friendly" should mean it works the first time.
Pre-seeded organic grow mediums, 85%+ germination tested. If your seeds don't sprout in 14 days, we send free replacements.

4

No app. No subscription. No login.
Plug it in. There's nothing to download, no account to create, no software to update. You own the farm. The farm grows the food.

Built by hand.
In small batches.
In Chicago.

We don't use MDF, plastic panels, or particleboard. Each cabinet is real wood, hand-finished, and laser-engraved with the Aquager logo. Because every batch is built by a small team, slight grain variations between pieces are part of the craft — your farm looks like itself, not like a copy of someone else's.