A guide to the 10 most popular types of wood used in furniture making and interior design. First part – oak, walnut, beech, fir, hornbeam
Choosing the right type and combination of wood for furniture-making and interior design often feels like walking around in circles with no way out. The reason for this is the lack of information about the types of wood, what they represent in the space and the effect they have on people.
Oak
There are over 500 different types of oak trees and they cannot all be used for furniture-making or creating parts of the interior. The widely known “Slavonian oak” is highly renowned and it is used for making furniture, flooring, doors and windows, as well as exterior and interior cladding.
This is a hard, durable and versatile wood. Our eyes are mostly used to seeing the rings and structure of the oak tree, so it is the most common choice when it comes to wood types because it is the one that is most familiar to us. Tree rings with striking wide heartwood lines make every interior element seem unique, incomparable and extremely personalized. So, without giving it much thought, the oak tree is the number one choice of wood.
Walnut
Walnut is the king, in the true sense of the word: it rules the space and no one can take his rule away from him! Next to furniture and interior elements made from walnut, everything and everyone else becomes irrelevant. The walnut tree comes in a wide range of colours and shades, from light yellow and orange to dark, almost black. Apart from furniture, the walnut tree can be used for making flooring because it is a quite hard and durable wood.
The black oak is a special kind of oak which is quite rare and which features an especially striking dark structure which makes it extremely renowned. We have decided to take this a step further and include interior elements made from black oak canopy in our offer.
Beech
In the last century, beech was the most common wood used in furniture-making due to its prevalence and its soft and visually pleasing rings. Beech is a hard and serene wood, especially when it is treated with saturated water vapor, the procedure in which the most common goal is to change the colour and even out the humidity of the wood. In this process, the beech turns red and becomes a type of wood with an attitude and full of individuality.
Bernardo Bernardi and many of his contemporaries designed furniture made out of beech. This was a time when serene, friendly, and familiar beech rings dominated interiors. The beech tree is extremely bendable so it is often used to make furniture and interior elements which feature rounded shapes and forms.
Fir
The evergreen fir is a soft tree with many bumps which gives it a special charm. It is of a lighter shade, pale yellow or reddish-brown colour and it is used in construction and interior design.
Most common associations, when it comes to fir, are the following ones: kid’s bedrooms, saunas and Austrian hotels. And even though all of this is true, in this day and age fir comes in various shades and colours, while maintaining its restless structure. These colours are applied like organic oils and they help transform the fir tree into a new and significant player on the furniture-making and interior design market.
Hornbeam
A very hard, restless, insurmountable, but beautiful type of wood – hornbeam, comes as a true surprise when used in the interior. It is used for making flooring and it can be thermally modified, so it is extremely durable and can be used in the making of wooden outdoor decking which gives places, such as poolside areas, a special kind of ambience. However, hornbeam furniture-making is a difficult task, one which we have managed to execute successfully. We have made various hornbeam furniture pieces which are gorgeous, and whose beauty could be compared to a precious silk material or a pleasant ray of sunshine, to say the least. Only the few of the lucky ones are able to incorporate hornbeam furniture in their interiors.