Hardwood Species Guide: How to Choose the Right Wood for Your Custom Furniture

The choice of hardwood species is one of the most consequential decisions in any custom furniture commission. Each species has a distinct aesthetic character, a different structural profile, and a different relationship with light, age, and finish. Here is how we think about the main options.

American Black Walnut

Walnut is the most sought-after domestic hardwood for custom furniture, and for good reason. The heartwood is a deep, chocolate brown with a warm undertone that photographs beautifully and reads as luxurious in almost any interior context. The grain is typically straight, with occasional figuring (crotch figure, curl, feather) that elevates a slab into something singular.

Structurally, walnut is excellent — it machines cleanly, holds joinery well, and is stable after proper drying. On the Janka hardness scale, it sits at 1,010 lbf, which is harder than cherry but softer than white oak. It will dent under heavy use, but it is easily touched up and can be refinished multiple times.

One thing clients should know: walnut is colour-sensitive to light. Fresh walnut is dark. Over years of exposure to natural light, it lightens and warms toward a golden brown that many clients find even more beautiful. This is a feature, not a flaw — but it is worth knowing.

White Oak

White oak has become the defining hardwood of contemporary furniture design, and the demand is well-deserved. The grain is open and pronounced, with medullary rays that produce dramatic fleck figuring in quarter-sawn cuts. The colour is pale grey-brown with warm undertones — a perfect neutral that reads equally well in modern, traditional, and Japandi interiors.

At 1,360 lbf on the Janka scale, white oak is significantly harder than walnut and more resistant to denting. It also accepts fumed and pigmented finishes exceptionally well — the open grain creates visual interest even under flat or matte finishes.

White oak is our most-specified species for dining tables, and it is easy to understand why. It is durable enough to withstand daily use, versatile enough to suit almost any interior, and beautiful enough to anchor a room.

Hard Maple

Maple is the hardest of the common furniture species at 1,450 lbf. It is pale cream to light blond, with a fine, consistent grain that takes paint and pigmented finishes better than any other domestic hardwood. For painted cabinetry or furniture where uniformity of surface is the priority, maple is our first choice.

In natural finishes, maple is subtle — some find it stark, others find it clean. It works best in contemporary and Scandinavian-influenced interiors where the wood is a supporting player rather than the focal point. In figured form (curly maple, bird's eye maple), it can be genuinely spectacular.

Cherry

Cherry is the aristocrat of American hardwoods — fine-grained, smooth, and extraordinarily beautiful in natural oil finishes. It starts out a pale salmon-pink and darkens over years of light exposure to a rich reddish-brown that is unlike anything else in the domestic species range.

At 950 lbf, cherry is the softest of the main furniture hardwoods and will mark more easily than the others. But for clients who want a piece with maximum elegance and are prepared to accept that it will accumulate character over time, there is nothing quite like cherry in a bedroom or library setting.

How We Help Clients Choose

We keep large-format samples of all our standard species at the workshop, finished in the styles we offer. We encourage every client commissioning a custom piece to come in and see the samples in person — under our workshop lighting and under natural light — before making a final decision. A species that reads as the perfect neutral on a website can look entirely different in the context of your actual room.

We also build sample doors and drawer fronts in the chosen species and finish before any production begins. The cost is absorbed into the commission. The value to the client — and to our confidence in the final product — is considerable.