Hardwood
With hardwood, the paperwork is part of the specification — not an administrative step after it.
Oak, teak and mahogany for joinery and marine work; birch and beech for furniture and interiors. The species that carry the highest value are the species where legality, protected-species listing and documented origin decide whether the parcel can be shipped at all — and that is a question to settle before a price, not after.
The programme
Five species, two quite different buyers.
Half of this book goes into joinery, doors, staircases, marine fit-out and exterior work, where the timber is chosen for durability and stability. The other half goes into furniture and interiors, where it is chosen for how it machines and how it finishes.
- Oak
- Quercus spp. European white oak for joinery, flooring, staircases and exterior work. Durable heartwood, high tannin content — which is why it stains black in contact with ferrous fixings and why stainless is specified where the fixing will be seen. Sold on appearance grade, and the grade spread on oak is wide enough that the grade is most of the price.
- Teak
- Tectona grandis. The marine species: naturally oily, dimensionally stable, durable in wet service without treatment. Decking, rails, joinery on vessels. It is also the species where origin documentation is most heavily scrutinised, and where we will not proceed without it — see legality.
- Mahogany
- Traded as a name that covers several genera with quite different properties and quite different legal status. The botanical name governs the transaction, not the trade name — Swietenia macrophylla is CITES-listed and is not the same purchase as an African or Asian species sold under the same commercial label.
- Birch
- Betula spp. Fine, even texture, machines and turns cleanly, takes a finish without figure fighting it. Furniture components, interior joinery, and the veneer species behind birch plywood — see Engineered Wood.
- Beech
- Fagus sylvatica. Hard, dense and excellent under machining, steam-bends better than almost anything else in the programme. Furniture, seating frames, worktops, interior components. Poor durability outdoors — it is an interior species and should be specified as one.
Legality
Three regimes, and any one of them can stop the parcel.
On softwood, origin documentation is good practice. On tropical hardwood it is the transaction. We would rather decline an enquiry than ship a parcel whose paperwork will not survive an inspection at the destination.
| Regime | What it governs | What it means for your order |
|---|---|---|
| CITES | Trade in listed species. Several commercially important hardwoods are listed in Appendix II or III, including Swietenia macrophylla and a number of species traded commercially as rosewood. | A listed species needs export and import permits issued before shipment, in the botanical name. No permit, no shipment — and a permit cannot be obtained retrospectively for goods already moved. |
| EUDR | Wood placed on the EU market or exported from it must be deforestation-free and legally produced, evidenced by a due diligence statement with geolocation of the harvest plots. | Applies from 30 December 2026 for large and medium operators and 30 June 2027 for micro and small operators. Not triggered by a Gulf delivery, but the upstream data has to exist if the goods may later reach the EU. |
| Sanctions | UK and EU prohibitions on wood of Russian and Belarusian origin, applying to goods that originate in, are located in or are consigned from those countries. | The shipping route is not a defence and transhipment through a third country does not clean a parcel. We source from European mills and document origin to the mill, not to the port of loading. |
Grading
Hardwood grading measures the clear yield, not the look of the face.
Softwood appearance grading describes the surface. Hardwood grading, in most systems, describes how much clear, usable material can be cut out of the board — which is a different question and produces a different kind of argument.
- EN 975-1
- The European appearance grading standard for sawn hardwood, covering oak and beech. Grades are defined by permitted features on each face, assessed over the whole board.
- EN 942
- The joinery timber standard. It sets classes by permitted knot size and defect limits for timber in joinery, and it is the specification to quote when the timber is going into windows, doors or stairs. If your enquiry says “joinery grade” without a class, this is the standard that turns it into a number.
- EN 1313-2
- Permitted dimensional deviations for sawn hardwood, and the reference moisture content the sizes apply at.
- Cutting-yield systems
- Where a parcel is sold to a North American or tropical grading rule instead, the grade describes the percentage of clear cuttings obtainable. Comparing a cutting-yield grade to a European face grade is not arithmetic — it is a conversion with assumptions in it, and we will state ours rather than quietly apply one.
Moisture
Hardwood moves more, and it moves unevenly.
Denser timber holds more water per unit volume and shrinks more as it loses it, and hardwood shrinks about twice as much tangentially as it does radially. That difference is why a flat-sawn board cups and a quarter-sawn board from the same log does not.
- Specify the target for the destination, not the mill
- Interior joinery in an air-conditioned Gulf building sits at a lower equilibrium moisture content than the same joinery in northern Europe. A parcel kiln-dried to a European interior target and shipped to a conditioned Gulf interior will keep drying and keep moving after it is installed.
- Say how the boards are to be sawn
- Quarter-sawn, rift-sawn or flat-sawn changes stability, appearance and price, and it is decided at the log, not at the order desk. If stability matters more than yield, say so before the log is broken down.
- Acclimatise, and allow the time in the programme
- Hardwood joinery wants time in the space it will occupy before it is machined and fixed. That time is a line in your programme, not a courtesy.
- Wide boards are the ones that fail
- Movement scales with width. Where a specification calls for wide single-piece components in a variable climate, the honest answer is often a laminated or finger-jointed component instead, and we would rather propose that than sell the wide board and be right about the cupping later.
Marine and exterior
Durability is a species property. Treatment is not a substitute for it.
Where timber will be wet, in ground contact or exposed, the governing question is the natural durability of the heartwood — and sapwood of any species, including teak and oak, is not durable regardless of how durable the heartwood is.
That has three practical consequences worth stating plainly. First, a specification for a durable species has to exclude sapwood explicitly, because a board can be entirely legitimate under an appearance grade and still contain sapwood. Second, preservative treatment penetrates species very differently: some hardwoods are effectively refractory to it, which means a treated component of the wrong species is treated on the surface and untreated where it matters. Third, fixings and fittings matter as much as the timber — oak's tannin will corrode ferrous fixings and stain black around them, and in wet exterior work stainless is the specification, not an upgrade.
For marine fit-out and exterior joinery we will ask what the exposure actually is before recommending a species, because “outside” covers a shaded balcony and a deck in Gulf summer sun, and those are not the same duty.
Straight answer
What it is not, said before you find out.
- We will not ship a listed species without permits in hand
- CITES documentation is issued before movement, in the botanical name, and cannot be regularised afterwards. An offer that says the permits will follow is not an offer we will take, whoever it comes from.
- Trade names are not specifications
- “Mahogany” and “rosewood” each cover species in different genera with different legal status. We will convert a trade name into a botanical name with you before quoting, and the contract will carry the botanical one.
- Hardwood is bought by the log, so consistency has limits
- Colour, figure and grain vary between logs and between seasons, and a repeat order is not a colour match. Where a project needs visual consistency across phases, the material has to be bought in one parcel and stored, not ordered twice.
- An appearance grade does not exclude sapwood
- If the application is exterior or wet, sapwood exclusion is a separate line in the specification. Leaving it out is one of the two most common causes of a durability failure that gets blamed on the species.
- Beech is not an exterior timber
- It is excellent under machining and poor in the weather. We will say so rather than take the order.
- We are a merchant, not a sawmill
- We can hold a mill to a specification and have a parcel re-inspected. We cannot produce a grade recovery the logs did not yield, and where a grade is short in the market we will tell you rather than quote a number we cannot fill.
How to specify
Nine lines, and we can price it properly.
- 1 · Botanical name
- Not the trade name. If you are unsure, give us the application instead and we will propose the species.
- 2 · Grade and rule
- The grade and the grading system it is written under — EN 975-1, EN 942 with a class, or a named cutting-yield rule.
- 3 · Sawing
- Flat, rift or quarter-sawn; whether sapwood is permitted; whether boards are to be square-edged or unedged.
- 4 · Dimensions
- Thickness, width or width band, and length or length band. Say whether the size is as sawn or finished.
- 5 · Moisture content
- Target and tolerance, set for the destination climate and the end use.
- 6 · Application and exposure
- Interior, exterior, wet service or marine — this is what decides whether the species is right at all.
- 7 · Certification
- FSC or PEFC required or not. For listed species, confirm you can hold the import permit at your end.
- 8 · Volume and repeat
- One parcel or a programme, and whether later parcels must match this one visually.
- 9 · Destination and timing
- Port and country, so permits, phytosanitary requirements and packing are settled before the log is cut.
Inspection
What we check, and what travels with the goods.
- Species verification
- Botanical identification where the species is listed, high-value or commonly substituted. On a listed species this is not optional and the permits are issued against it.
- Pre-shipment inspection
- Where the buyer requires it, an agency appointed for the consignment — SGS, Bureau Veritas or Intertek — instructed jointly, verifying species, grade against the named rule, dimensions, sapwood limits where specified, moisture content across the parcel, piece count, volume, marking and packing.
- Grade verification
- Against the rule named in the contract, with the sampling method and pass criteria agreed before shipment. The mechanism for resolving a grading dispute belongs in the contract, not in the correspondence afterwards.
- Documentation per shipment
- Grading certificate or declaration per parcel; CITES export permit where applicable, with the import permit confirmed at the buyer's end; kiln-drying certificate; phytosanitary certificate for the destination; ISPM 15 marking on packaging material; FSC or PEFC certificate and transfer document where sold certified; legality documentation appropriate to the origin and destination; packing list reconciling to the bundle marks; certificate of origin naming the mill; bill of lading; and the inspection report where an agency is appointed.
Enquiries
Every enquiry is answered by the desk that handles it.
Send the product, quantity, delivery basis, destination and timing. We revert with availability, an indication and the documentation that accompanies it. Specifications are released once we know who we are speaking with.