sourcing wood to finishing furniture - all done with caRE
We create woodworks from reclaimed wood
Good woodworking starts with good wood, and our home base in Thailand gives us some of the world’s best timber species. As Thailand no longer has a logging industry and the valuable big trees are locked away in national parks, we search out old wood slabs for recycling into furnishings.
Many of our slabs have been in storage for decades in old warehouses and mills. We even recycle discarded utility poles, often so weathered we can't identify the species until we cut into them. We are also sought out by collectors of valuable wood slabs, many of them held in storage for decades, akin to collecting gold bars.
We kiln dry all our wood ourselves
We dry all the wood for building furniture in our own dry kilns shown here. This is essential to ensuring it can safely be exported to countries with drier climates without problems such as the wood cracking or cupping. It resolves a key question about buying any woodworks from Asia – is it properly dried? At times it is not. That's because the countries of Southeast Asia are among the most humid in the world, and air-dried wood with its higher moisture content might be sufficient if the table stays in Asia. But if it is exported to drier overseas climates without being kiln dried, it could eventually crack as it continues to dry in its new home overseas. Our dry kilns ensure this doesn’t happen to any of the furniture we craft.
We keep the unique features of each piece
There is nothing standard about our wood, as it is collected from many sources and cut in a wide variety of sizes. This can be seen in the extra thickness of this Thai teak slab, for example. We need to flatten the wood as it was first milled decades ago, but at the same time want to preserve its rare thickness as much as possible. This means a lot of careful work by hand. But that suits our woodworkers as they want to keep the natural character in this slab as much as possible.
Our detailed work shows under tables
While most table buyers focus on the top of the table, we suggest they check the underside to see the level of care that went into crafting the table. This photo of the bottom of our Rain Tree table shows a metal C-channel routed into the woodwork to ensure it remains flat. It’s not really necessary as the wood is already kiln dried and very stable, but we see it as added insurance. We also installed threaded metal inserts into the wood where the legs are attached to the table with screws. This makes it simple to attach and detach the legs by screwing into metal rather than wood, keeping the connection strong even if the legs are detached and reattached in future years. PS: We finished these legs with Japan's shou sugi ban wood burning technique.
