Every slab has a provenance. We can tell you where yours stood.

Claro walnut

The shop’s default and its signature. Claro is a Northern California walnut, and most of what we buy comes from orchard and urban removals, trees taken down for reasons that have nothing to do with lumber. The figure ranges from straight chocolate grain to violent crotch and burl patterns that look almost geological. It is hard enough for daily family use, stable once properly dried, and it is the species we recommend first for a dining table that has to survive children.

Old growth coast redwood

Salvage only. No new old growth is cut for this shop, and the entire supply of old growth redwood lumber is fixed and will never increase. The heartwood is warm, luminous, and extraordinarily stable, with growth rings packed twenty to thirty per inch. It is also soft, around 450 on the Janka scale against roughly 1,000 for black walnut, so it takes dents and records use. We tell clients that before they commit rather than after. There is a full account of sourcing and working properties on the Old Growth Collection page.

California bay laurel

Also called pepperwood or myrtle depending on who you ask. Bay laurel spalts readily, meaning fungal activity draws fine black lines through the wood before it is milled, producing figure that simply does not exist in commercially graded lumber. It is unpredictable stock and it comes in small quantities, which makes it right for one of a kind pieces and wrong for a project that needs eighty board feet of matched material.

White oak

The quiet one. Tight grain, high durability, and the most forgiving surface we build. When a project needs cabinetry or millwork that has to take decades of hands and doors and shoes without complaint, this is the answer. Quartersawn white oak also gives the ray fleck figure that reads as traditional without reading as ornate.

Drying, movement, and why it matters to you

Wood moves. It takes on moisture in a humid season and gives it back in a dry one, and it does so across its width far more than along its length. Every failure mode you have seen in a solid wood table, the cupped top, the split down the middle, the joint that opened, comes from ignoring that.

So: stock is conditioned in the shop to the moisture content that matches an interior before it is cut. Tops are flattened and finished on both faces so both sides breathe at the same rate. Bases attach with hardware that lets a top expand and contract across its width through the year. Existing checks get stabilized with butterfly keys or epoxy, and which one we use is a design decision we make with you, not a repair we hide.

How we buy

We track West Coast mills, salvage operations, and reclaimed timber yards every week. When a rare slab that fits a client’s project surfaces, we move on it before it sells, which is one of the reasons a deposit matters: it lets us buy your wood the day we find it. If you are waiting on a specific species, width, or length, tell us in your inquiry and you go on the list we check every load against.