Knock on Wood - Part 1
Greetings cuties! Thank you so much for joining me today. On this episode we will be talking all about everyone’s favorite architectural material. From furniture to flooring, to the very structure inside our walls - wood is all around us. But wood is by no means a monolith - there are so many different types of wood to use in your home. It’s critical to understand the advantages and perceptions of different species. Today, you’re going to get an understanding of wood species, their history, different uses, and their connotations. This will allow you to make the best choices for all of your home projects. For instance, after this episode, you’ll know exactly why you wouldn’t select cherry as your wood flooring.
Wood has multiple things to consider when you’re selecting it, so this species talk is part one of two in our wood series. Next week we will dive into finish and grain cut variations which have a huge impact on how the finished product looks. This is you personal library for the fundamentals of wood, to help you understand how to use wood in your home, whether you are building a piece of furniture, selecting wood flooring, or even just shopping for decorative wood elements.
I have a confession to make, and if you’ve listened to this podcast before this will hardly come as a surprise- I think wood is overused. I see it both in commercial projects and in homes - too often, it’s our fall back on how to bring in warmth, interest, and organics elements. What kind of floors do you want? Wood. What’s your dining room table top? Wood. What’s your coffee table? What’s the accent wall in your guest bedroom? Wood. Wood is magical, but like anything else, overexposure causes it to lose its allure. But that’s not to say I don’t actually love wood myself. In fact, I think wood is one of the most fascinating materials we have available to us on this planet, and I am going to take you on a journey to get to know your average and not so average woods. The more we know about any particular material, the better we can implement it in our design projects.
You’ve probably heard the more common species of hardwood get thrown around causally in conversation - “oak, maple, walnut, mahogany - oh my!” But what do these different species mean, what do they even look like? Why would you use one as opposed to another, what difference does it make? Fear not my friend, I am going to guide you through some of the more commonly used species. There are so many species of wood and I will definitely not get to all of them, but I’m covering the varieties you’ll be most likely to see in design magazines and your local hardware store.
Walnut trees, the same ones we gets nuts from, are common in many parts of the United States, including California, the Northeast, and Midwest. We don’t typically use other nuts trees as lumber. Almond and pecan trees produce wood that can be nice for small projects, but have problems with cracking, buckling, and warping when it comes to mass production. The cashew tree’s wood contains skin irritants that can cause similar effects to poison ivy. The walnut tree is different. The walnut that we eat isn’t a nut at all - it’s technically the fruit that the tree bares. The botanical name for the walnut tree is Juglans, which translates to "Jupiter's nut." Oddly enough, in Chinese astrology, the planet Jupiter is ruled by the element wood. Jupiter, from an astrological perspective, relates to scholarly pursuits - which isn’t surprising when you consider walnut’s prevalence in Ivy League dining halls and libraries, plus the walnut fruit itself resembles a brain.
Walnut as a wood, is a real crowd pleaser. It’s a medium density and is usually fairly dark in color, with lots of richness in its grain variation. While this wood is sturdy and resistant to warping, it’s equally easy to cut and carve, and it’s light weight for its level of durability. You’ll see the name Black Walnut often, although English Walnut is common as well. Walnut trees can grow to be 100 feet tall, with a life span of up to 400 years. It’s the darkest naturally occurring readily available wood in the United States. Because of its color, and the potential longevity of the tree - walnut has a very serious vibe. It clads the interiors of government buildings, banks, and law offices. It’s austere, but not cold. It hints at things beyond its surface. No one questions a space with walnut wood- it’s legitimate.
In stark contrast to the towering Walnut, stands the small and might Maple tree. Known for its light, creamy yellow-blond color and gently wavy grain, this wood is unique in so many ways. There’s a variety of different species of maple, all from the botanical Acer genus. Acer being the same latin root as acid, meaning sharp or severe - referring the tree’s pointy leaves. This includes the Sugar or Rock Maple, the Black Maple, the Norway Maple - all considered hardwoods. There’s also the Silver, Red, and Boxelder Maples - which fall into the softwood category. The maple is one of the few species of trees that jumps back and forth between the worlds of hard and softwood depending on the variety. Maple softwoods are deciduous, meaning they grow leaves, but their trunks rarely grow large enough for their wood to be suitable for lumber. Let’s put a pin in the hard vs softwoods conversation for a minute- because that is a very interesting topic that we will revisit later.
One species of maple - the Sugar Maple is really what you’ll see the most of used in interior design and the built environment. The Sugar Maple is the same tree that brings us the sweet syrup used in cooking, baking, and pancake topping. At its largest, you could see a 45 foot high maple, but most fall closer to 30 feet. It makes sense then, that with its relatively shorter stature, compared to other forrest dwelling deciduous trees, its ability to thrive in the shade is extremely high. While they need cold winters for proper dormancy and seed germination, they are strong, nimble, and adaptable, to a variety of climates - making them one of the more common trees world wide - being found in Asia, Europe, and North America. It’s also amongst the strongest woods - maybe it’s all that time in the cold and shade, but Sugar Maple is harder than most of its common contemporary options including walnut, oak, cherry, or pine.
Maple trees are like social gathering hubs. Maples attract all kinds of creatures including moths, worms, butterflies and especially us humans who circle around the trees to collect its sap. Maple trees tend to grow wider and taller trunks when they are clustered in groups, as opposed to single plantings. It’s no surprise then; considering their athleticism, strength, and social butterfly nature that maple is the wood of choice for all kinds of sporting event spaces and equipment. Bowling alleys and pins; basketball courts and dance hall floors; even baseball bats are all traditionally made from sturdy Maple.
Maple is also a beloved and coveted wood amongst wood workers and furniture makers. One particular variety, birdeyes maple - is consider especially valuable and rare. It’s a mystery exactly how birdseye maple forms - the interior of a sugar maple tree becomes covered in tiny organically placed dots, similar to the look of the stars in the night’s sky. Many have speculated that this is caused by a particular variety of pest that loves to peck away at the wood itself, but this has never been conclusively proven. The mystery of its origin undoubtedly adds to how prized it is.
Moving right along, the oak tree falls within the Quercus (qwuirk-kiss) genus, from same family as the Beech tree. Oaks existed before humans, with fossils up to 52 million years old being recorded today. Referred to as the King of the Woods in Celtic mythology, the oak is symbol of endurance, strength, protection, and triumph. It’s no surprise then, that oaks can live upwards of 1,000 years. In fact, the adjective 'durable' originates from Celtic word for the oak tree - duir. In Norse mythology, the oak tree is an earthly embodiment of Thor, the God of Thunder, and was the wood of choice for early ships, as many varieties have some semblance of water resistance.
Many western countries have chosen the oak as symbol for their country, including England, Germany, and the US. There are over 500 varieties of oak trees all across the Northern Hemisphere, in all kinds of different sizes and shapes. On average, oaks grow around 45 feet tall and their branch spans can be nearly the same distance, making them often as wide as they are tall- many varieties are technically considered shrubs. Nevertheless - druids worshipped oak trees, associating them with good luck and prosperity, often having wedding ceremonies under old oak trees as a sign of abundance for the marriage.
Oaks of course produce acorns, which, along with the leaves and bark of the tree, contain poisonous tannins. Theses compounds can be lethal to most animals, with the exception of squirrels and sometimes pigs. The tannins help the tree resist insect and fungal attacks. As many wine lovers know, however, tannins play a crucial role in the development of wine and alcohol. Oak is porous enough to allow oxygen to interact with whatever is being stored in it, and its wood does have a pleasing flavor associated with it - therefore oak is the only choice for wooden wine and whiskey barrels. Not only that, but oak is a popular chose for smoking foods like cheese, meats, and fish. Ecologically, oaks are one of several trees that qualify as a Keystone Species, meaning they aid in the growth and development of other species and life in the forest. For instance, multiple species of truffles have a symbiotic relationship with with root systems of certain oak species, and truffle farmers make sure to include them on their land. Oak trees clearly play a strong and multifaceted role in human’s consumption and enjoyment of the finer foods in life, and back several 100 years ago their bark was even used to relieve digestion issues.
From an interior design perspective, there are really two types of oak to work with - just like wine - red and white. The main difference between these two options is their subtle but distinct variation in color. White oak is sandy, blonde - with more contrast in its graining than maple. Red oak is similar, but with a slightly lighter color and a pink tone. It should be noted that both of these woods will oxidize over time with exposure to the air, meaning their colors will get darker. This ties back to the wood’s high tannin content. Oxidation occurs slightly in most woods but can be more noticeable in oak. If you aren’t familiar with this process, it’s the same phenomenon that causes copper to turn aqua blue when it’s been outside for too long. But, its’ porousness allows it to be stained easily and with gorgeous results. Oak is strong - just slightly less hard than sugar maple, a great choice for high traffic areas. It’s connection to food, for me, can’t be ignored. I love seeing oak in a kitchen, pantry, dining room, or a chic restaurant. Oak makes an amazing table top or flooring choice that will last a lifetime.
The cherry tree, known for their internationally celebrated blossoms, symbolizes new beginnings, friendship, fertility, and revival. Abundantly grown in North American, as well as Japan, this tree produces a rich reddish wood with a fairly straight grain. This is by fair and away one of the most popular woods in the world of furniture. The color deepens over time, similar to oak, but with cherry the change is even more dramatic. Freshly cut cherrywood is as light pink as red oak, but over the course of a year the wood’s exposure to UV rays cause the color to deepen to its iconic auburn hue. Cherry is one of the softer common hardwoods, so while it’s easy to cut, carve, turn, and lathe; it isn’t often used as flooring because it would be too vulnerable to denting and scratching. It also absorbs stain in a slightly blotchy manner, so it’s best finished with a clear sealant. Cherry brings a punch of cheer into any space it’s used. It’s bold, warm, friendly personality can be a bright breath of fresh air when used in small doses, but make no mistake - this is not a neutral wood. Its fiery energy can overwhelm a room when used as a main element - as is evident in many spaces built in the 1980’s. Treat it like sugar in your coffee - a little goes a long way.
Poplar, more specifically Yellow Poplar or Tulip Poplar, falls in the same botanical family as Cottonwoods and Aspen trees. This wood is found mostly in the central Southeast of the United States - West Virginia, Kentucky, North Carolina, and Tennessee. You may see it simply labelled “poplar” at the lumber yard, but oversees its marketed at American Tulipwood. It doesn’t actually bloom with tulips but the blossoms look similar, and so the name has stuck. The tree needs tons of sun to keep up with its fast growing pace. At 20 years old it can be over 40 ft tall, which in the world of hardwoods is impressive. Its trunk is often clear of branches, making it easier to mill. This makes poplar more affordable, but aesthetically, it’s less distinct than maple, ash, oak, or other common woods. In fact, sometimes poplar is stained red to pass as a fool’s cherry. The wood has a light creamy color with a visible, sometimes high contrast grain. Poplar is often used for its utility. It’s can be painted, veneered over, or used for portions of furniture that won’t be visible. It’s light-weight and medium density, and although this makes it easier to move and lift than something like walnut, it can make it slightly challenging to cut. Its softness can lead to splintered, jagged edges when sawing or carving. Although, it is said that native Americans took advantage of poplars buoyancy and carved whole logs to use as canoes. But this wood is being used more frequently in construction a substitute for pine. Once in a while, minerals will penetrate the trunk and the wood will have giant stripes of green and purple, aptly named rainbow poplar.
Birch, a distance cousin to Oak, is another cold-weather loving tree, native to Scandinavia and Russia. Birch trees are synonymous with life force and healing, known to symbolize growth, renewal, and initiation. They are considered a pioneer species, meaning they are first to regrow and aid in the land healing process for forests that have been destroyed by fire. In Nordic saunas, the branches that are used to stimulate blood flow are traditionally birch, which makes sense considering birch bark exact was historically used to help heal skin rashes and relieve joint paint.
Birch as a building material is light and golden in color, with a wild looking grain full of cathedrals (those ripply looking lines on the face of the wood) and can be further exaggerated by knots and natural color variations due to fungi and insects that burrow into its trunk. Working with solid birch can be challenging, the finished face of the wood can be a little rough, and it lacks the glossy shimmer of other woods like maple. So just as in the forest, birch is a leader in beginnings, likewise in the woodshop, birch inspires innovation. Birch is commonly broken down to be used in other ways besides its solid slab, namely plywood. Plywood is a manmade product created by stacking thin layers of wood with their grains running in alternating directions. This creates an amazingly strong criss-cross structure. You can see the different layers if you look along the side of a piece of plywood. Plywood is then often finished with a layer of veneer from a more expensive wood or painted. Birch is a favorite for plywood because its strength allows it to be milled into thin sheets without cracking. Another way to enjoy birch it using it for butcherblock - often in the form of counter tops. This is a sheet of wood that is created with the endgrain of many pieces of wood, sometimes slightly resembling a chaotic checkerboard. Birch wood is hard, heavy, and strong; but not unyielding. Birch plywood is one of the most commonly used woods when looking to create a curved form. This can be done either through steaming the wood and clamping it to the desired curved shape or, by continuously and evenly scoring one side of the wood to create a pliable, bendable panel. Being that this wood is so abundant in Denmark and Sweden, the same countries where the Mid-Century Modern design movement originated - birch was a common choice for architecture and furniture during this innovative era.
The hickory tree, native to the midwestern US, China, Mexico, and Canada; is exceptionally hard. Even harder than the sugar maple, plus hickory is extremely dense, and flexible enough to take a beating. This makes it the perfect choice for the handles of tools, baseball bats, drum sticks, golf clubs, axes- anything you might swing in the air with full force. That air may also be smokey if you’re using hickory wood chips or charcoal to add flavor to your barbecue. Its color can vary widely, with most pieces falling into the medium warm brown category. But its grain is wild and wavy, making birch look boring. It’s almost like you are taking a snap shot of the wild convection currents of the smoke from its chips or the sound waves from a drum stick.
One species that is fairly common, but doesn’t get much air time is Ash. A member of the olive tree family, ash is found all over the US, Europe, Australia, and Asia. The word Ash comes from the old English word for spear, as this wood was use for weaponry historically. Ash plays a big role in both Greek and Norse mythology - the World Tree in those folklores - the one that connect heaven, the terrestrial plane, and the underworld? That’s an ash tree. Ash has a medium golden color with a straight, fairly low contrast grain. It can be a great swap for pricier oak. Unlike oak, ash has a serious lack of tannins, making their leaves a good food source for animals, including beetles, caterpillars, and frogs. Ash is incredibly durable and easy to maintain, making it my personal go-to.
When you hear someone like a realtor say the term hardwood floors, the interesting thing is that you rarely hear the term “softwood” used in contrast. This is probably because it’s a connotation that soft equals weak (which in case you didn’t know by the title of this podcast, I am striving to change that mode of thinking). The real distinguishing factor between hardwood and softwoods is that hardwoods come from trees that flower and have leaves, so really all the woods we just went through. Softwoods come from coniferous trees like pine, Douglas Fur, Redwood, Cedar. Pine actually accounts for about 80% of the world’s timber supply, and prior to the industrial revolution this was the wood of choice for flooring, building ships, making entire log cabins. Today pine is still used flooring, furniture, doors, roofing, hand carved details, and it’s the species of choice for chipboard. If you buy a 2x4 at at a hardware store, it’s most likely pine. Pine is inherently insect resistant, as many bugs prefer the sweet smell of hardwoods, although the smell of pine is quite pleasing to most humans.
In the United States, where this wood is native, pine played a huge role in the early construction and development of the country. A big advantage to using pine is that it grows fairly quickly, at least in comparison to its hardwood alternatives - oak and walnut trees can take a lifetime to mature, and even good old polar needs two decades. Pine takes around 15 years until it’s ready to be harvested. This means more pine for everyone, and typically at a lower prices than other woods. Although, scarcity due to global warming has shifted this, for sure. And yes, pine is soft sure, but it’s sturdy, flexible, and easy to cut and sand. Pine is often not used in commercial construction for buildings or furniture because of its softer properties. I wouldn’t use pine in a hospital or office because it would definitely get dented, but for lighter use home projects, it holds up just fine.
In fact, the terms “hardwood” and “softwood” are kind of misleading stereotypes. If you are really concerned about the hardness of the wood you are using, there is a rating scale called the Janka Hardness test, which is easy to find online , and ranks woods according to their hardness. The hardest commercially available wood is Australian Buloke (Bull-oak), which is an evergreen that looks a lot like a pine but is technically hardwood. Conversely, did you know Balsa wood is actually a hardwood? If you ever made a model or you’ve seen this stuff in the craft store, you know Balsa is about as hard as styrofoam. Despite researching the entomology and word origins of the hard and softwood misnomer, the best explanation I could find was that the needles on evergreen trees and their “softness” account for the name, although frankly that just makes me think that maple leaves are also quite soft. And yes, again it’s a stereotype - most hardwoods are harder than most softwoods. But this isn’t an absolute, don’t let the language fool you.
Then we get into some of the woods that are perceived as potentially more luxurious that I’m sure you’ve heard of - mahogany, teak, zebra wood, rosewood, purple heart, sapele, anigre. These woods are extremely popular - whether for their rich pigmented color, high contrast grain, strength, or lustrous shimmering finish. Many of these woods are only sourced in small areas of the world, primarily Africa, and the tree species are slow to re-grow. Their scarcity adds both to their cost and for some, to their appeal. Some of these woods are so scare, they’re considered endangered. Certain species like Rosewood are heavily trafficked in the same manor as Ivory. Although many of these woods are exceptionally beautiful, they aren’t practical to use in projects today due to their cost and lead time. I would also recommend avoiding these types of woods due to the chain of custody that many of them go through in order to arrive in your home. Spoiler alert, human rights and ethical farming practices are not put at the forefront of these woods’ extraction.
Speaking of chain of custody, this topic of how wood is grown, farmed, solid, distributed, manufactured, and then resold, has a certification system that helps you the consumer, as well as us interior designers and architects determine if the wood is sourced ethically. This is the Forest Stewardship Council, or FSC. The FSC's mission statement is to "promote environmentally appropriate, socially beneficial and economically viable management of the world's forests.” Choosing wood that has an FSC certification is supporting a company that works to prevent tropical deforestation and bolster timber trade transparency across country borders. You can look for their logo on products the same way you can find energy star certification on applicances - it’s a little tree that morphs into a check mark with the letters FSC below it. Now the FSC is not without criticism, other sustainability advocates have called out FSC, including Greenpeace and the Rainforest Foundation, for not doing enough to certify their claims. With that in mind, seeing the FSC logo on a piece of wood is not a bad thing, but there are other things to keep in mind to ensure the wood you use is sustainable and ethical. One of the best ways to ensure you’re choosing an ethical and sustainable wood, is to use wood species that are abundant and native in your region. I will leave a few links in the show notes of great resources that allow you to see where specific tree species are most common through out the United States and beyond.
There are also small business that make sustainable and reclaimed wood their priority - so many, in fact you can probably search for reclaimed wood with your city and find a litany of selections. Reclaimed wood went through a full trend cycle in the last 5 years, where the barn-looking wood was everywhere, now it’s fallen a bit of out fashion, but reclaimed wood doesn’t have to look like it fell off the side of a deserted silo. Sourcing reclaimed wood can look just as polished as new - a great resource to check out is the Hudson Company - which specializes in wood flooring, much of which is reclaimed. For furniture there’s Coutnerev Home that uses the pine from old bowl lanes to create modern furniture, or Urban Tree out of Pittsburgh that only uses fallen or removed trees to create stunning works of art. They’ll even tell you the address the tree came from. If you’re going full DIY - make sure to check out your local salvage store - these places usually get shipments of lumber from various places that you can scoop up for quite the deal. If you aren’t afraid of a little extra elbow grease, you can try salvaging a wood palette - the kind they use in shipping warehouses.
I can’t wait for part two on this series, it is going absolutely blow your mind and help you select the wood of your dreams. I hope you enjoyed this deep dive into wood species, and I will see you in the next episode.
