Timber.

How we buy

In the board, not in the pack, and wherever possible chosen off the rack rather than ordered by grade. Oliver Manning or Paul Sims goes to the yard for anything that will be seen: island tops, dresser fronts, a run of doors that has to read as one piece.

Everything is brought into the shop and left to acclimatize before it is cut. Kiln-dried stock for interior work at eight to ten percent moisture content, checked with a meter, not assumed. Air-dried stock for anything going outside.

Offcuts do not go to landfill. They fuel the biomass boiler that heats the workshop.

Species by application

There is no best timber. There is a right timber for a particular job, and the choice is usually decided by how the piece will be used and finished rather than by how the board looks in a photograph.

Painted work is the clearest example. A close-grained hardwood takes paint far better than oak, whose open pores telegraph through even a good finish. So most of our painted in-frame joinery is poplar — tulipwood, as the trade calls it in England.

Movement

Timber moves across the grain and hardly at all along it. A solid oak panel three feet wide can change by an eighth of an inch or more between a damp February and a dry August with the heat on. An American house with forced-air heating is drier again, which is why we ask about it at survey.

So panels float in their grooves and are never glued in. Wide tops are buttoned or slot-screwed so they can move against the frame beneath. End-grain butcher block is built to move as a unit. Breadboard ends are pinned, not glued through.

Radiant floor heating and wood-burning stoves make rooms drier than most houses have ever been. We ask about both at survey and adjust the specification accordingly.

Quarter-sawn and plain-sawn

Plain-sawn boards come off the log tangentially. They give the wide cathedral figure most people picture when they think of oak, they yield more from the log and they cost less. They also move about twice as much across the width, and they cup.

Quarter-sawn boards are cut radially. Straight, tight, parallel grain, and in oak the medullary rays show as silver flecks across the face. They are more stable, more wasteful of the log and more expensive.

We use quarter-sawn where stability decides the job: door frames, long countertops, wide panels, anything in a historic interior that has to sit still for two hundred years. Plain-sawn where the figure is the point, on a dresser back or a single-board table.

Book-matching and sequencing

Consecutive boards or leaves off the same log are opened out like the pages of a book, so the figure mirrors across the center line. On a run of doors, or a set of library panels, it turns eight separate components into one piece of timber.

It only works if the material is kept in order from the yard to the bench. Boards are numbered as they come in, stacked in sequence and cut in sequence, and the rod records which leaf goes where.

Cabinet-grade veneered plywood is treated the same way: book-matched and sequenced across a run, not laid up at random.

Sourcing, honestly

We buy through British merchants and from European mills. Where a mill holding recognized chain-of-custody certification can supply the section, the grade and the cut we need, we use it, and much of our European oak comes that way.

Some does not. A single wide elm board from a local yard, a parcel of air-dried English oak from a Suffolk sawmill, a piece of figured walnut bought because it was the right piece, rarely arrives with a chain-of-custody certificate attached.

So we will not tell you that every stick in your kitchen is certified, because we could not prove it. We can tell you which merchant or mill each board came from, and we will put it in writing if you ask.

How we make it →   Choosing timber for a painted kitchen →   The workshop →