Good wood

How to indulge in beautifully designed wood furniture and keep your tree-loving conscience (mostly) clean.

By Miranda Purves

Nov. 12, 2004 | Some of you readers may, like me, think that a dramatic fiscal crisis is the only event powerful enough to persuade certain les états rouges to rethink their voting style. To that end, you're planning on curtailing all shopping for the next four years to help speed the economy along a downhill slide.

But perhaps we're being too hasty. Voting with our dollars may be one of the few proactive pleasures around right now. It is reassuring to know that a little enlightened consumerism, however small a drop in the global economic bucket, can help support alternatives to everything hateful in the world: deforestation, Wal-Mart creep, generica, corporate crap, golf (well, maybe nothing can stop that...). Let's quickly turn to thoughts of metaphorically greener pastures that got that way without sucking up 1 million cubic meters of water a year (the golf course average), like the very happy-making reclaimed wood furniture movement.

Reclaimed wood has been diverted from the waste stream. (Considering forests may soon be scarcer than diamonds it is shocking to consider how frequently people chuck wood in the garbage or burn it). It's one of the categories accepted under the Rainforest Alliance's SmartWood label, a certification accredited by the Forest Stewardship Council that lets individuals and companies know what they buy isn't from clear cuts, or endangered rainforests, and comes from sustainable tree and bamboo farms that profit local communities. Unfortunately, only a small percentage of wood sold in the United States is stamped, but the idea is catching on. Last year, the Action Sports community (aka Xtreme athletes) learned about FSC and decided to use 90 percent SmartWood in their ramps. Starbucks decorates their stores with SmartWood, and some chain stores -- such as Cost Plus World Imports, Smith and Hawken and Ikea -- source some SmartWood furniture.

For those of us hung up on the second of the three Rs, reclaimed SmartWood offers a particular satisfaction. And, not only does it involve rigorous reuse, it also, because of the irregular nature of found wood, requires that milling and building be done on a smaller scale, so consumers are supporting the local, or at least national, non-mega corporation economy.

For the past decade, small lumber companies like Pioneer Millworks and TerraMai have been combing the globe, finding railroad cars in Southeast Asia or rafters from a demolished 1930s General Motors plant in Buffalo, N.Y., and turning them into plank floors and beams. In Northern California craftsman transform reclaimed wood into Arts and Crafts furniture (Whit McLeod) and shaker tables (Wooden Duck) using old-school woodworking methods.

I have to confess having a love/hate response to the reclaimed wood industry. I love the idea of salvaging something earmarked for destruction, and I romanticize to no end these entrepreneurial modern-day Adam Bedes with hearts of gold who can actually do things with their hands other than wring them in panic over the environmental crises, obsessively wash plastic takeout containers in the company washroom, and write checks to the NRDC.

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