Benchmark Furniture decided it was time to make a statement and it’s made it in American red oak at the prestigious Clerkenwell Design Week.
Sean Sutcliffe, managing director of the design and manufacturing business he co-founded with Terence Conran, said that he and fellow furniture makers have recently been “left reeling” by the rapidly deteriorating availability and rapidly rising price of one of their mainstay materials, European oak.
“We’re an industry in shock,” he said. “Nine months ago we were paying £38/ft3 tops for European oak. Now it’s double to three times that and more. In a business where your raw material is 35% of your costs and prices are more than doubling, that’s an end product selling price rise of 50%-plus right there. It’s just unsustainable.”
Obtaining the timber, never mind paying for it, has also been an increasing struggle.
“We’ve been touring mills in France, but they’re all reporting chronic shortages,” said Mr Sutcliffe. “It’s down to global demand and, in particular, we were told, more Chinese buyers moving into the European market – France and Italy – and placing large forward orders. Companies like ours aren’t operating that far ahead and we’ve basically been faced with taking what’s left. The war in Ukraine, with timber barred to Europe from Russia and Belarus, has just added to the problem, exacerbating the availability crisis and putting even more pressure on price.”
With Clerkenwell Design Week coming up (May 24-26), Benchmark was faced with a choice in terms of material for the new additions to its Victoria contract furniture range it had developed for the event. It was either try and hunt down the European oak it had originally intended to use in conjunction with Grown in Britain ash and meet the soaring cost, or do something different.
“We had a discussion and I said, let’s take a position on this. Let’s drop European oak because of these issues and use red oak with ash instead,” said Mr Sutcliffe. “In terms of affordability and security of supply, it seemed a route well worth pushing down. Although red oak has seen some price inflation, there’s still a very significant advantage over European oak and, while we didn’t have an established supply chain, availability didn’t appear problematic and we just ordered in some packs.”
It wasn’t entirely a leap into the unknown for Benchmark. It previously worked with the American Hardwood Export Council (AHEC) on a number of design and manufacturing showcase projects using red oak.
Its crafts team became still more au fait with it when, in association with AHEC, the company undertook an exhaustive weeklong trial of the timber in its workshops. To give the evaluation more weight and ensure the results were meaningful, it was overseen by Arup’s global timber specialist Andrew Lawrence, while AHEC technical consultant Neil Summers wrote a report on Benchmark’s experience with the material and conclusions.
The company put US red oak, alongside European and American white oak, through their paces in the range of machine and manual wood working processes.
“We undertook compression, tension and a lot of destructive testing and looked at how it works by hand, how it stained and sanded,” said Mr Sutcliffe.
The wood was literally put through the mill. It was also sawn, planed, drilled, routed, tested in a variety of joint types and a range of finishes.
“Overall the Benchmark team were impressed with red oak’s machining properties – one comment was that it cut like butter,” said Mr Summers. “They also remarked on its excellent finishing characteristics. They bleached it, whitened it, ebonised it and scorched it with a blow torch, Shou Sugi Ban-style.”
The timber was also steam bent around a tight radius.
“One craftsman said he was staggered by its bending capability, especially as they normally only steam bent air-dried hardwood and the red oak was all kilned,” said Mr Summers. “It also performed well in strength testing. It only broke at 1-tonne pressure and even then retained elasticity, which is useful in joint making.”
In fact, there were no areas where red oak was markedly inferior to its rivals. In some it outperformed them.
“It could chip out when cross-cutting, and some CNC’ing left a bumpy end grain, but it sands so well neither proved insurmountable problems,” said Mr Summers “Its open grain means it requires more glue, but again that could be overcome.”
“It’s fair to say everyone was satisfied with it as a material,” said Mr Sutcliffe.
He acknowledged that making the change to red oak is not without its issues.
“We’re used to using through-and-through cut European oak boules, enabling us to undertake big projects out of one log and match the grain. With US red oak we’re buying packs of square-edged timber and, the way it’s sawn, everything is crown grain whereas our customers are accustomed to rip sawn straight grain,” said Mr Sutcliffe. “Getting colour consistency from packs can also be an issue. So it isn’t just a straightforward case of ‘let’s switch to red oak and that’s the end of our problems’, because it will result in other challenges.”
However, he added, these can be overcome through selection and processing.
He’s also not convinced the timber sector preoccupation with the russet tones of some red oak extends to specifiers and consumers.
“I think it’s something we ‘woodies’ in our bubble are focused on, but you can knock the colour of red oak back with white oil to the shade of white oak. And I’m not sure many consumers and some users notice the difference regardless. I was at a French trade fair and I commented to one company it was interesting they were using red oak. They replied ‘are we?’!”
What primarily draws consumers to solid oak, white, red or European, he maintained, are its haptic or tactile attraction, its solidity, durability and biophilic benefits.
“We woodies may see red or white oak. I’m sure most consumers just see oak.”
Benchmark’s other key motivation for using red oak is its sustainability – the fact that it comprises nearly a fifth of the total US hardwood forest, so there’s plenty to go around.
“I think what we’ve seen with European oak availability and price recently is a foretaste of things to come,” said Mr Sutcliffe. “If we keep going back to the same species we’ve always used, we’ll see increasing supply stress, which never mind the resulting price inflation, is bad for the forest and the environment. An oak tree isn’t ready for harvesting until it’s 130-150 years old and currently we’re consuming European oak faster than the trees are growing. And, with the race to net zero, timber is moving ever more centre stage for architects and designers, so the pressure on the resource can only grow. We have to adapt and work in harmony with the forest and use the range of species it produces in line with the rate it produces them.”
Benchmark recently worked on a major project for a California tech firm, which conducted its own research to evaluate which US hardwood was most sustainable. Red oak came out top. And while third party environmental certification may not be the default option with US timber it is for European oak, Mr Sutcliffe points to the continuing monitoring and science-based evaluation being done by the American industry to demonstrate and validate the legality and sustainability of its hardwood resource.
So, it seems, Benchmark’s use of red oak for its Clerkenwell Design Week pieces won’t be a one-off.
“For one thing, we see little prospect of much change in European oak prices – timber price inflation usually has a one-way valve. Prices may come off their peaks, but rarely return to previous levels,” said Mr Sutcliffe.
“Red oak is a shift for us, but it’s one that’s been brought about through our familiarisation with it working with AHEC, which has given us confidence in it as a material. That combined with supply and price and the timber’s sustainability credentials are what’s going to drive this forwards for us.”
