About the Various Woods

The usual approach to acquiring woods for furniture is to design the pieces, draw up a "cutting list" of lumber needed, buy the lumber and proceed to build the piece. Although I sometimes follow this method, I often do the opposite: allow the design to flow from the unusual characteristics of the woods I acquire. I am constantly scouting out fine examples of woods of all kinds for their innate beauty, and then design pieces that best express that beauty.

While many of my pieces are made exclusively with solid woods, others are created with veneered panels on larger surfaces to achieve a desired effect or to utilize exotic woods that are prohibitively expensive or unavailable in solid form.

About Veneering

During the past century or two, the mass manufacture of ordinary and often shoddy furniture overlaid with veneers to give the appearance of solid-wood construction has shed a negative light on the time-honored art of veneering.

In actuality, veneering has been used in the finest examples of woodworking throughout history—dating back to ancient Egypt. To this day, some of the best craftsmanship—from elegantly inlaid jewelry boxes to $300,000 grand pianos—rely heavily on veneering.

At Joe Stearns Furniture and other fine furniture-making studios, veneering is used where appropriate to implement designs that would be highly impractical using only solid woods, for several reasons:

First, the best logs from a harvest are usually cut into veneers, with the obvious purpose of utilizing the resource more efficiently. Thus, veneering allows surfaces to be made with finer quality woods than otherwise possible, and the art of matching flitches of veneer can create many interesting patterns such as the symmetry achieved by bookmatching, four-way and radial matching.

Second, really fine and exotic woods are often so rare and expensive that using them in solid form when only one surface is visible makes no sense in terms of cost or the waste of a scarce resource.

Third, many especially beautiful and rare woods are generally available only as veneers, again to get the most from a limited resource.