When people ask me what makes Braid & Wood pieces different from the thousand other plant stands and wall hangers on the market, the honest first answer is usually the wood.

Almost every hardwood piece I design and produce is made from solid white ash. Not oak, not walnut, not maple, and not pine, or plywood, or fiberboard with a printed veneer. Solid White Ash. 

The same choice, piece after piece, collection after collection. Customers notice. Retailers notice. And I get asked about it constantly. What it is, why I chose it, why I haven't switched to cheaper options, and how do the pieces hold up the way they do.

This is the story behind the design.

Raw White Ash hardwood being cut for Nested Plant Stand (left image) Arches Plant stand (right image)

Completed Nested & Arches Plant Stands made from solid white ash hardwood.

What is White Ash & What Makes It So Special? 

White ash (Fraxinus americana) is a North American hardwood. It grows primarily in the Eastern United States, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Ohio, the Appalachian range.

It's the wood used for baseball bats, hockey sticks, and some of the best wooden furniture made in the last century. You've been around it your whole life without necessarily knowing it.

Physically, ash is strong and shock-resistant with an open, pronounced grain.

It's noticeably lighter in color than oak. White ash has a pale, almost blonde tone with subtle warmth and the grain reads as clean lines rather than busy swirls. When you finish it with a clear, matte, natural finish (which is all I ever use), it looks like the wood is just being itself. No stain, no color layered on top, no pretending to be something it isn't.

Why I Use It Over Other Harwoods

There are three materials I considered seriously early on, and I want to walk through why I moved on from each of them.

Oak

Oak is beautiful and I have no complaints about it as a material. But it's heavier, it's visually busier (the grain has a lot going on), and it's harder to pair with ceramic and lighter styling. I think oak has a lot more texture than ash, it's rougher in feel. Ash is structurally comparable to oak while reading cleaner and smoother in a finished piece. For the kind of quiet, architectural design I build toward, ash wins.

Walnut 

I love walnut. Omg, do I love walnut. Let me say it again, I love love walnut. It's probably one of my favorite wood varieties. In my office at home, my desk is solid walnut. It's my favorite piece of furniture in the house.

Walnut is rich, moody, it's absolutely gorgeous. And it's not the right material for everything I make, because I design pieces that need to work in dozens of interior palettes, warm homes, cool homes, light rooms, dark rooms. Walnut demands a certain kind of space.

Walnut also demands a certain kind of budget. The raw material is EXTREMELY expensive and that would make Braid & Wood products double or triple in price and that's just not something I want to do right now.

My goal is to make beautiful, unique, designer-led home decor attainable for most people. I couldn't do that with if all my designs were made out of solid walnut. However, I would love to work with walnut some day. :) 

Engineered Wood (MDF, Plywood, Particleboard with Veneer)

This is the one I need to be most honest about, because engineered wood is everywhere in home goods right now and most customers can't tell the difference from a product photo.

Engineered wood with a printed or thin-veneer surface photographs exactly like real wood. In your home, it chips at the corners, swells if it gets humid, and develops a grey-brown color at edges that looks unmistakably cheap.

It cannot be repaired. It cannot be refinished. It's meant to be thrown out and replaced. 

 

The Test That Actually Matters

The question I ask myself before every material decision is the same one: will this still look beautiful in a decade?

Solid white ash ages into itself. The wood slowly warms in tone over years, a gentle deepening from pale blonde toward a honeyed amber and develops a soft patina from being lived with.

The grain becomes more visible, not less. Small dings and scratches integrate into the piece instead of ruining it. In ten years, a white ash plant stand will look older in the best possible sense of the word: lived in, loved, still right.

Engineered wood will always fail the test because it can only look worse with age. The day it leaves the factory is the day it looks its best.

The Cost Question

Solid ash is more expensive than the alternatives. I'm not going to pretend otherwise.

White ash costs more to source, it costs more to machine, it's heavier so it costs more to ship, and the yield from a raw board is lower because of how precisely I want each piece cut. 

Natural solid hardwood varies in tone. There are lighter pieces and there are darker pieces. When you are machining a Braid & Wood Arches Plant Stand or a V-Hanger you can't put a really light toned piece next to a darker toned piece, it will look mismatched. This is called color or tone batching and that process is also very expensive and time intensive.  

A Lesser Quality Material 

When I was designing the Arches and Nested Plant Stands I priced out early prototypes in a high density fiberboard with a painted finish, the material savings were about 65%.

I actually went into production on a few hundred pieces to test further but I could feel the lack of quality right away. The piece was light, the edges were soft, and they easily chipped. The design did not represented what I wanted for Braid & Wood products.

I also knew that a plant stand made from engineered wood at a cheaper price point would need to be replaced in three to five years. 

The Bigger Principle

Material choice is where a product designer's values actually show up. You can put any language you want on a website, "premium," "heirloom-quality," "thoughtfully-made." The material is where you find out whether any of it is actually true.

I chose solid white ash because it's the single most honest material I've found for what I want to build. It's strong, it's beautiful, and it ages well.

Every piece that Braid & Wood ships to a customer is a small win against disposable decor & furniture, and that win will always live with the material chosen to make the product.

So when you see a Braid & Wood plant stand, wall piece, or ANY home decor piece for that matter, really consider the material selection. It says a lot about the product, how long it will last, and where quality lands in a brand's value system.