Imagine if architects and designers could fully utilise the value of every hardwood log, including the boards with knots and colour shifts that rarely make it into European design. That idea became Wood for the Trees, a six-stage walk-in forest at Shoreditch Design Week earlier this month, with every column, stool, bench, and hanging veneer built from No.1 Common timber.
“If we only use 10 per cent of the tree, which is what is happening at the moment, we’re not being responsible,” said David Venables, European director of the American Hardwood Export Council (AHEC), in Copenhagen earlier this year. No.1 Common holds a similar amount of clear wood to the upper grades in smaller cuttings, AHEC says, and was first created as the cabinet grade for cabinetry, flooring, and furniture parts.
Red oak, which AHEC calls the dominant species in US hardwood forests, takes its name from its autumn leaves, and its wood is not always red. Cherry, which AHEC says regenerates rapidly after forest fires, joined it in the exhibition alongside yellow birch and hard maple, a species grown for both lumber and syrup.
Mitre & Mondays, the London studio of Finn Thomson, Josef Shanley-Jackson, and Freya Bolton, conceived the exhibition for AHEC as an abstracted forest after the trio watched Forested Future, the council’s feature documentary. Benchmark, the furniture maker founded by Terence Conran and Sean Sutcliffe, built the forest for the Tab Centre in Shoreditch from boards donated by six sawmills.
“We really wanted to bring the forest back to this timber,” Thomson said in Copenhagen, with the studio setting out to give people “some of the physical experience of navigating a forest as these foresters do.” Some of the forest’s trunks turn on rings of wooden spheres, and every component was designed to come apart so the timber can be readily reused after the show.
And where Copenhagen visitors moved through five stages, from how trees regenerate to the point where they become timber, the London edition added a sixth on design. That stage asked visitors to rethink their habits regarding what the wood can do and how much the forest can supply.
Meanwhile, Salamanca Lumber Company and Granite Valley Forest Products joined the four sawmills credited with donating timber for Copenhagen. Benchmark also displayed its own furniture above the forest canopy, made using what it calls circular thinking, so that timber can be appreciated for generations.
“Hopefully it starts a conversation about how this is such an interesting selection of wood, and why people aren’t specifying more of it,” said Martin Penrose, Benchmark’s head of design, of the Copenhagen show. Architects in London could sign up for a hands-on session with Sutcliffe and Neil Summers of AHEC to learn how species and grade shape the timber they specify.
At the same time, AHEC and Benchmark put American Hardwood Assured (AHA), the council’s verification platform, on the programme as the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) changes the timber supply chain. The platform combines deforestation assessment, jurisdictional legality checks, blockchain, and isotopic testing, a mix AHEC says can prove provenance “at a scale and accuracy previously out of reach.”
The hardwood forests of the eastern United States were little more than “stumps and ashes” a century ago, but AHEC says they are now growing at twice the rate they are harvested. In a forest, Venables said, “some will be harvested, and some will be left to grow the next generation,” which he called “what will give us more trees in the future.”
