Wood selection can elevate a piece and this is something that bespoke makers can do that you won’t find in furniture manufacturers, which are focused on mass production, low cost, scale and consistency.
For a little fun, lets check out the mainstream market using a certain department store with renowned Christmas adverts. It’s probably a reasonable representation of the middle and majority of the market for someone shopping for furniture. My mini research contained 84 cabinets from a range of brands. There were quite a few pieces where the wood type was not stated in the product specs so this brought our starting number down to 69.
First up lets look at the wood species typically used. Oak is a classic choice for furniture so unsurprisingly it tops the charts as the most common wood type with over half of all the furniture being oak derived.
What surprised me was the runners up – mango and acacia. If we take a look at the country of manufacture we can see that a lot of furniture is made in Asia, particularly India where this material seems to be widely used. Vietnam producers used most of the oak, India was mango and Poland was birch.
Another attribute you often find is that the furniture is not made of solid wood but rather MDF and an oak veneers. Now veneers are not bad in themselves. They can be very helpful to incorporate unusual woods, only available as veneers, or if wood movement cannot be tolerated in the design. Neither are probably true for mainstream furniture and I suspect it simply comes down to cost. It’s cheaper to glue an oak veneer over MDF than use a solid board of oak.
This is where a local maker can really make a difference. There’s an abundance of beautiful woods that be used in a design – Elm, Pear, Walnut, Cherry to name but a few.
Even the ever-dependent oak can be a lot more interesting. Pippy oak has a raft of swirls and little knots that add interest. Brown oak has been colonised by a fungus that stains its wood a rich dark brown.
If you want even more usual then veneers offer an almost endless choice either in wood variety or in the form of wood burls. Burls are where the tree has grown around an injury and form a lavish pattern of swirls. These burls are often integrated into box designs for their beauty.
So I hope this gives a little insight into how bespoke makers can offer something a little different to mass produced items. Not only in terms of wood species but also in terms of uniqueness. A bespoke maker will embrace the more unusual characteristics of the wood to make each piece of furniture a one off.
