OurTravels

Welcome friends,

I have often spoken about this warmth I have for solid wood. I have a lot of it in my own home. Different kinds with different treatments. Some people like having a uniform look and so we produce ranges out of the same materials finished in the same way to suit that, but I have always been one for accents. Woods on woods.

There are a few things you might like to know that are not commonly realised about solid wood, that could inspire you to look more closely and with greater discernment. There are actually worlds of things to know and realistically I can only deal with a few bits, piece by piece - but here is a start.

Well, we would all like to have things made out of Brazilian Mahogany but there just isn’t any left and you don’t find much being recycled because we are talking very valuable antiques that you don’t find by the side of the road waiting for Council pickup.

So you have to look at using what’s available, responsible and reasonably affordable. Some of the timbers we favour are plantation Teak and Mahogany, recycled Teak, Acacia, Shisham, Mango and Chinese Oak. I guess that’s a matter of pride in itself because you don’t find furniture houses that offer this kind of range to begin with. Anyway, in no particular order:

Mango is a fruit wood best for designs that are big and heavy. You can make very solid-looking, really durable furniture out of Mango that is still affordable, and how it looks all comes down to how you process it – but I will come to that. You would never write Mango off as a ‘cheaper’ and therefore an undesirable option because you can create pieces in it that are incredibly impressive for their sheer volume in wood, and for that matter, finicky races like the French have always been very keen on it. It has a veiny, shimmer grain that you can do nice things with.

Teak is an oily, very dense-grained timber that I am particularly fond of. I have to say it for the Dutch. These guys established huge plantations in the ‘Spice Islands’ in the 1700s and they have been maintained over the years, otherwise Teak might be as rare as Brazilian Mahogany. It does take a very long time and continuous replanting to keep the exotic hardwood supply up but Teak is okay and there is a new strain that grows much faster. The timber is not what you would expect of a 100-year old tree, but it does mean that you can do very acceptable Teak furniture with a very acceptable price point. It’s interesting that the Malaysian government has planted heaps of the new strain in many public spaces as a ‘show’ tree, but also to harvest and replant in the cycle. This is great thinking. We don’t have any hesitation buying teak out of, say, Kalimantan in Indonesia simply because it doesn’t exist there as a native tree. It has to be plantation. We use plantation teak, and also hoarded and recycled teak, which has been seasoned over very long periods. It is quite hard to source but if you know the right people and are prepared to do the miles into sometimes scary country, you occasionally come across a treasure trove that people have put away.

Acacia is a highly-renewable hardwood. It is dense and grainy but it grows surprisingly quickly so it is becoming increasingly popular, partly because its growth rate makes it more affordable and partly because it is a ‘green’ solution. You can get away with Acacia furniture in outdoor situations too, because of its density and natural oil content – you can hardly lift the stuff because it’s that heavy. With some careful treatment, it comes up beautifully.

Mahogany these days is plantation wood and while it is still a hard-as-nails, grainy hardwood, and definitely a very superior timber, what you get out of it depends completely on how you treat it. I could easily get on a hobby-horse here. If you prepare and work with mahogany like it’s a piece of pine well then go make something out of pine instead. It’s a difficult timber to work but it will reward you sensationally for painstaking effort.

Shisham is breathtaking hardwood out of India. You might know that it’s a cottage industry there. The idea is that when a child is born, a Shisham tree is planted and then harvested to provide dowry at the child’s marriageable age. I spend a lot of time in India and last time I looked, there were a fair few kids around so I suppose I am not too worried about Shisham disappearing off the map. It is a beautiful, dense, lustrous material. It’s not inexpensive but every piece of Shisham timber will last lifetimes and has an amazing tale to tell.

Chinese Oak is readily available and reasonably priced and highly suitable for certain kinds of pieces. What I mean by that is that you could have a bar-top made out of a few pieces of Shisham and spend the rest of your life paying it off without all that much in terms of making a huge difference to the look of the room. I think that when you use beautiful solid wood with a story behind it you really should make it count. Unless you have more money than you can spend.

And Next...

As I said there is a lot to go into here. I would like to talk much more about the individual woods. And colouring processes and trends, textures, proportions and most particularly, the dozen or so key decisions and processes and allocations of time and attention to detail that can turn a raw piece of timber into something amazing, or not. However the people that know things tell me a thousand words is about the limit in one go.

Take a look at our website next month and I will try to cover off the processes solid wood furniture should go through to make the most of the timber. And how you might see whether it has, or has not been respected.

Michael Edwards