The more we understand the unique characteristics of wood and its source, the better we can understand how much warmth and beauty it can bring into our everyday lives. Each piece of wooden furniture is a unique masterpiece of design and texture as every piece of wood has a unique grain pattern. There are several types of wood and it will take a lot of passion and patience to discover all the types of woods in the world.
To simplify it, the classification of wood is generally divided into two groups; softwood and hardwood.
Softwood is commonly produced by cone-bearing trees while hardwood is wood from leaf-bearing trees.
“How do I know if it is Softwood?”
SOFTWOOD is produced from coniferous or evergreen trees. Evergreen trees do not lose its leaves annually like hardwood does as coniferous trees have needles and not leaves. Conifers are fast growing tress and can take 20 to 30 years to mature. Any timber that comes from coniferous tress is open grain. Open grain means it is not as durable as hardwood. Some softwood trees are used for paper production. Paper is usually made of pine wood, which is a type of softwood. There are many types of softwood used in the production of furniture as well, including pine.
“How do I know if it is Hardwood?”
HARDWOOD is mainly produced from low growing trees. Hardwood timber is close-grained, therefore is best suited to make furniture. Close-grained wood is known to be strong and does not easily split. Hardwood trees can also take up to 100 years to fully mature. It’s no wonder the price of hardwood timber in the market is expensive! As we can see, there are furniture industries that use hardwood as their base. In KIAN, we commonly use hard wood to make our furniture i.e ash, beech, oak, balau, rubberwood and nyatoh. In fact, KIAN first began manufacturing tabletops using rubberwood. Rubberwood is known as an environmentally friendly and inexpensive choice of wood as it makes use of rubber trees that have already served its useful function of producing latex.
Check out some of our hardwood timber products below:
Gajah Chair with solid oak legs
Dana Chair with solid beech frame
Hank Chair with rubberwood frame