Red Oak
Red oak accounts for one-third of the eastern United States’ hardwoods. Its availability once made it prime lumber for barns, but today, it is the primary wood in American-made furniture. This medium-hard wood offers easy workability alongside impressive durability, ensuring furniture that endures.
Red oak stands out with its distinctive color, shade, and grain. The yellow-red tone brightens any room, and while it accepts numerous stain colors, it keeps a warm undertone. The grain generally appears straight with a coarse texture, which remains visible even when cut differently.
White Oak
White oak stands as the second most common hardwood used in furniture. Like red oak, it provides durability in many settings. A slightly harder wood, it lasts even longer. It finishes easily in nearly any stain color, adapting to various styles. It resists decay and rot, making it well-suited for damp spaces. Its resilience allows artisans to steam-bend it into endlessly creative designs.
The grains add to its versatility. Quarter-sawn cuts reveal its cellular structure, creating flecks called medullary rays that form a “tiger pattern,” highly prized for its unique quality. Another rough-sawn cut creates a tight, straight grain that minimizes medullary rays. White oak remains a favorite among furniture makers because of its workability, strength, and creative potential.
Brown Maple
Maple, especially abundant in northern Ohio and Indiana, finds frequent use in commercial furniture. The sugar and silver maples remain the most common. Brown maple is found in the heartwood of these types, close to the tree’s center. It varies in hue, from white and airy to reddish or golden. Hard maple (sugar) is found in the outermost portion of a log and offers impressive scratch resistance and finishes with a smooth, cloudlike texture. Its fine grain and soft, light hue work beautifully in steam-bent furniture. Both brown and hard maple glue, plane, drill, and carve with ease.
Because of its smoothness, contemporary and modern designs often feature maple. But some maple has unique aspects, like curly, tiger-stripe, or bird’s-eye patterns. Curly maple’s wavy grain seems to “curl” along the board, and birds-eye maple plays with perspective.
Hickory
Hickory stands as America’s hardest and heaviest wood type, scoring 1820 on the Janka Hardness Scale (compare to hard maple’s 1450 and cherry’s 950). For heavily trafficked surfaces like dining tables, hickory offers unmatched performance. Hickory often appears in public kitchens, dining rooms, and living rooms. Its natural color features white with red tinges.
Because of its hardness, hickory can be challenging to nail. Woodworkers typically steam hickory into shape rather than risk splitting it with nails. This practice created the classic bent-wood rockers, which remain strong and beautiful, as evidenced by the century-old example on display at the Smithsonian.
Cherry
Common variations, such as black cherry or sap cherry, bring to furniture the same level of sophistication a Jaguar brings to cars. Traditionally used in classic styles, cherry has transitioned seamlessly into modern furniture designs. It remains the softest of the American hardwoods, but its dramatic shading makes it a popular choice for statement pieces in dining rooms. It has a distinctive, irregular grain.
Some confuse cherry with the softer poplar because both share a cloudy, filmy grain. When dried, cherry wood stains and finishes beautifully, revealing depth and warmth. Over time, it darkens, adding richness and character to any room.
Sustainability of Hardwoods Used for Furniture
These trees represent one of Earth’s most precious resources. They capture carbon, release oxygen, build our communities, and make up the backbone of construction. People didn’t always recognize their importance. In the early 1900s, states like Ohio contained a mere 10% of their original forestry. Through the concerted efforts of a wide range of groups, that number has grown to 30%.
Modern forestry practices rely on multiple elements to ensure sustainability. They cut carefully selected trees, rather than indiscriminately cutting entire forests. Logging companies must replant trees, replacing each tree they cut down with two new saplings.
One reason American hardwoods excel in furniture-making lies in their proximity. The forests east of the Mississippi River are dominated by oak, maple, hickory, and cherry. These hardwoods often get harvested, milled, and manufactured within the same region. Keeping everything “close to home” conserves energy, saves money, and reduces pollutants.
In Conclusion…
These five American hardwoods used for furniture give designers everything they need to craft high-quality, long-lasting furniture. Their hues adapt to various stains, ensuring a perfect fit in every home. Their ability to be glued, screwed, stained, and bent creates endless possibilities—allowing these woods to transform into everyone’s dream furniture.
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