Guides

Oak, Walnut or Mahogany: Choosing a Timber

The timber decides more about how a cabinet ages than any other choice you will make, and most of that is settled before a board is cut. This is how the four we use actually behave, and which one suits which room.

People usually arrive at this decision from the wrong end — a photograph of a finished piece, in somebody else’s light, at somebody else’s stage of ageing. Timber does not stay where the photograph caught it. Walnut lightens. Cherry darkens. Oak goes from the colour of a new floor to the colour of an old one over about a decade, and it does it whatever you put on it.

So the question is not which looks best now. It is which will look right in the room in fifteen years, against the floor and the panelling that are already there.

Before the timber: how the board was cut

This matters more than the species. A log can be cut straight through, board after board, which is fast and wastes almost nothing. Or it can be cut radially, so the growth rings meet the face of each board at a steep angle. The second is quarter-sawing. It wastes a great deal more timber, takes longer and costs more, and it buys two things.

Stability. Timber moves across its width as humidity changes, and quarter-sawn boards move roughly half as much as through-and-through ones. On a wide door in a house with underfloor heating and a dry winter, that is the difference between a shut line that holds and one that opens.

Figure. In oak, quarter-sawing exposes the medullary ray — the silvery flecking across the grain that people recognise in good English oak without knowing its name.

Everything below assumes quarter-sawn stock and boards kept together from the same log, because that is what we work to. How we select and set out timber covers the rest of it, including book-matching.

Oak

English oak, quarter-sawn, is the default and it is the default for good reasons. It is hard, it is stable once it has been dried and acclimatised properly, it takes a wax or an oil beautifully, and it is the timber most English houses are already full of — so a cabinet in oak tends to sit down in a room rather than announce itself.

It is also the most forgiving over time. Oak marks, and the marks become patina rather than damage. A scratch in oak looks like age. The same scratch in a dark polished surface looks like a scratch.

Against it: it is the most common choice, so it is the least distinctive. And new oak is noticeably paler than old oak — if it is going next to an eighteenth-century dresser it will not match for years unless it is coloured to get there.

Character oak and pippy oak

Both are oak with the interesting parts left in rather than cut out.

Character oak keeps the knots, the medullary rays and the colour movement that a clean specification would reject. It reads as older and more agricultural, and it suits a room with beams and a stone floor far better than clean oak does. It adds about 8% to the price of a cabinet, because the yield from the log is lower and more of the board is worked around.

Pippy oak carries clusters of small burr pips through the grain. It is the most figured of the oaks we use and no two boards are alike, which is the point of it and also the caution: on a large plain door it is magnificent, and across six doors it can become busy. It adds about 12%.

Neither is a decision to make from a photograph. Both are worth a sample in the actual room, in the actual light.

Walnut

English walnut is the one people fall in love with in the workshop and occasionally regret in the room. The figure is extraordinary, the colour is deep and warm, and a book-matched pair of walnut doors is about as good as cabinetwork gets.

Two things to know. It lightens — walnut mellows toward a warmer, softer brown over years, which is the opposite of what most people expect, and strong daylight accelerates it. And it is expensive and comes in narrower boards, so a wide run costs more and needs more careful setting out.

It suits a library, a study, a dark panelled room. It is a harder choice in a bright modern space, where it can read as heavy.

Mahogany

Mahogany is the traditional cabinetmaker’s timber and it is traditional for a reason: it is exceptionally stable, it machines and carves cleanly, it holds a crisp moulding and it polishes to a depth that nothing else quite reaches.

If the room is Georgian or Regency in feeling, or there is existing mahogany furniture in it, this is usually the answer and nothing else will sit right beside it. It darkens and reddens gently with age and light.

Against it: it is formal. In a farmhouse or a boot room it can look overdressed.

Painted, and when it is the right answer

Hand-painted work is not the cheap option and it is not a compromise. It is the right answer more often than people expect — in a room where the joinery should recede rather than be admired, where it has to match existing painted panelling, or where the architecture is doing the talking and the cabinet should not compete.

Our standard colours are Light, Medium and Dark, which go on any of the oaks, and Mahogany and Walnut, which go on those timbers. If none of the five is right we colour-match to whatever you give us — a paint reference, a piece of existing joinery, or a length of fabric — and there is no extra charge for matching on a standard-range cabinet.

Matching what is already in the room

This is the commonest brief and the one most often got wrong by ordering from a photograph. Matching is done by eye, against the actual piece, in the actual light — and it is a finishing problem more than a timber problem. The species sets the grain; the polish sets the colour.

What helps us: a photograph taken in daylight without flash, a second taken in the evening with the room lights on, and, if you can, an offcut or a drawer front we can work against. Where the existing piece is old, say so — matching new timber to something that has had eighty years of light on it means colouring forward to where it already is.

Choosing, in practice

If the room is	Start with	Because
Panelled, formal, or already has mahogany in it	Mahogany	It is the timber that architecture was drawn around, and it holds a moulding
A library or study, darker, with good artificial light	Walnut	The figure earns its keep where you sit close to it
Beamed, flagged, agricultural in feeling	Character oak	Clean oak looks too new against old stone
Bright, modern, or the joinery should recede	Painted	Colour is easier to place than grain in a plain room
Anything else, or you are not sure	Oak	It is the default because it is right more often than not

And if you are choosing between two, order both. Timber samples are £10 each, posted free, cut from the boards we are working to and polished to the finish you choose, so what arrives is what you will get. The cost comes off your order if you go ahead.

Questions we are asked