Material Guy – Part 2

In this part of my ‘materials’ series, we’re going to enter the wonderful world of wood! I love woodworking and a large portion of my home design is a shop for just that purpose. As with past home renovations I plan on building my own kitchen cabinets, any built-ins or shelving, my dining area table and possibly a lot of the trim and finish work in the house. That said, thinking about the species of wood, the color and finish is a good starting point even before design of those elements are completed. There will be some things out of my complete control with respect to wood used in the house with certain components coming from Stillwater. So in absence of that knowledge for now, I’ll focus on the pieces I can control and my thinking around certain design considerations, and tackle those other things later on in the process.

The house design has a Mid-Century Modern vibe to it, which works really well with my overall esthetic (highly functional, clean, geometric and uniform, with bold uses of color and materials, not ornate), so I’d like to be true to that. With its influences in Danish Modernism, where teak is the most common wood used, Mid-Century added an exploration of many other materials including plywood, plastic or fiberglass, glass and metal. But that was mostly focused on furniture design – where rosewood, mahogany and walnut joined teak for many pieces along with those ‘new’ materials. Also important to me is sustainability and how workable the wood is, then availability and cost (which rules out many of the species listed above). As a starting point, I’ll focus on the cabinets for kitchen and bath as those are complete pieces that I wouldn’t want to match the wood to things like doors or trim and would instead like to contrast them to make these cabinets the centerpiece of those rooms.

Most of my cabinet experience has been using plywood for the case and then using solid wood for face frames and doors and drawer fronts. This makes sense for cost and stability, especially given how much solid wood can ‘move’ in certain conditions. My last full kitchen remodel was done using maple veneered plywood and Red Maple hard wood, but I’ve also used Red and White Oak, Beech and Cherry in projects, as well as Birch (especially when the cabinets were being painted).

For my home, I’d like to lean into my learnings and experiences of the past, but also try some new materials or techniques. Without diving too deep into all the different cabinet and door types, I’m looking to go with faceless cabinets with doors that fit within the cabinets edges instead of over to keep the line modern. Some examples below.

Material-wise, the cabinets will be plywood-based – probably Baltic Birch, which is a product of Finland, Russia and the Baltic states and made entirely of birch plies with no filler plies or softwoods between the veneers. The B-BB face designations, which I won’t go into here are considered furniture grade, and I’ll be looking to veneer the outer faces. For the bathroom vanities, I’m thinking of a Walnut veneer – which can range from a pale brown to dark chocolate tone, with lots of grain variety depending on the cut (samples below), which should add nice detail/interest to these smaller pieces. Depending on the final design the drawer faces/doors might be solid wood or veneered.

For the kitchen, I’d like to go lighter, and given the large surface areas would like to keep to a more uniform grain pattern. My experience with Maple has it easily filling those requirements. Although it might be a boring choice, its simple beauty might work really well for what I had in mind. I’m also considering Cherry. While Cherry can be considered a bit old fashioned due to its popularity for Art Deco furniture, the straight even grain lends itself well to more minimal design and might add a little more ‘figure’ to the cabinets given its more contrasting grain lines.

All of these are excellent hardwoods, none are considered threatened species and all are readily available. Much more to come on this topic, but it helps me to start thinking about these things, and documenting them, as everything else crawls along. As I get more into design of these pieces (kitchen is pretty far along), I’ll start to discuss stains or finishes, hardware and so much more. But next in this series I’ll start to dive into flooring materials.