Is Suar wood sustainable? An honest answer

Suar is a tropical hardwood, and tropical hardwood is the one furniture material with a genuinely bad century behind it. Anyone about to spend serious money on a slab of it is right to stop and ask the question. What follows is the long answer — including the parts of it that cannot be proved to you from a website.

Why the question is fair

Mahogany, rosewood and teak were cut out of primary forest faster than forest could replace them, and for most of that time the trade ran well ahead of any law meant to hold it. Some of that is history. Some of it is still happening. A dining table is one of the few objects in a house heavy enough to represent a real quantity of tree, so the suspicion that attaches to it is not misplaced — it is proportionate.

The usual answer from a furniture site is a short paragraph containing the word “responsibly”. That paragraph costs nothing to write, which is roughly what it is worth. A better answer has to do two things a paragraph cannot: separate the species from the supply chain, and be honest about which half is actually evidenced.

What the rain tree actually is

Suar is Samanea saman, listed in some references as Albizia saman, and sold in the trade as monkey pod, raintree, albizia and sometimes acacia. Five names, one tree — the confusion is its own subject, and it has its own article.

It is called the rain tree because its leaves fold at the first drop of rain. It grows broad rather than tall, throwing a canopy that can reach thirty metres across from a single trunk, and across Java that canopy is the point of it: rain trees are planted along roads, at the edges of fields, over yards and village squares, for shade. They are put in the ground for what they do standing up, not for what they are worth cut down.

That is the substance of the answer. The trees these tables come from have stood a long time — that is where the depth of colour comes from — but the width did not take a long time, because breadth is the rain tree’s whole strategy. A dining-width board of teak or ipe represents a great deal of forest time. The same width of rain tree does not. It is not a slow, dense, deep-forest hardwood, and almost everything alarming about the tropical timber trade is about slow, dense, deep-forest hardwoods.

The hardness figures say the same thing from another direction. Suar measures around 850 lbf on the Janka scale, against roughly 1,010 for walnut and about 1,120 for oak — it is the softest of the three timbers sold here, and it is softer precisely because it grew fast. Density and patience are the same fact. The full comparison is here.

None of which means every Suar table on the internet is fine. It means the species is not the problem. The supply chain is where the problem would be, and a rain tree can be taken badly like anything else.

Where ours come from

Stated exactly as the sourcing page states it: no Suar tree is felled for Kayuko. Ours have already lived their span — cleared for replanting, brought down by storm, or removed where a road or a field needed the space a canopy could no longer spare. The slabs are cut, dried and worked in Jepara, on the north coast of Central Java, a district that has shaped wood for generations.

That is the whole of it. It is not longer than that on purpose, because everything past it would be invention.

Which pieces this is even about

Worth knowing before the argument goes any further: a good part of this collection is not tropical timber at all. These are the pieces the question applies to, straight from the catalogue.

Every Suar piece above is a single slab: the top is one tree, not several boards from several. That is a fact about the object rather than about the forest, but it is at least a fact you can see in the photographs.

What cannot be proved from a website

Here is the part the responsible-sourcing paragraph leaves out. Everything in the section above is a claim. You have no way to check any of it, and neither does anyone else reading this page.

Kayuko holds no certification it can show you. There is no chain-of- custody certificate to publish, no third-party audit of the yard in Jepara, no independent inspector who has walked the stacks and signed something. Not a certified supplier, either. Nothing. The sourcing above is what we know and what we say; it is not a document.

A sourcing claim you cannot audit is worth exactly what any unaudited claim is worth.

And what would count as better? Photographs. A dated picture of the log before it was cut, of the yard it was cut in, of the stack it dried in — with the piece it became beside it. That is weak evidence by the standards of an actual audit, and it is still an order of magnitude stronger than prose, because prose can be written by anyone about anything. Those photographs would be a better version of this article than this article is. They are not on this site today.

One more thing, while the register is honest: where the oak and the walnut come from is not published either. A temperate species is not automatically a shorter journey, and nobody here has told you it is. If the origin of the timber is the deciding factor for you, that gap applies to the whole catalogue and not only to the tropical half of it.

The counterweights that survive that test

What is left are the arguments about the object rather than its origin — and those hold up for a structural reason: the object is in the room with you, so you can check them yourself.

• It is solid all the way through. A veneered top is a skin of timber over chipboard; once it wears through there is nothing underneath worth saving, and the whole table becomes waste at the first bad scratch. A solid top can be sanded back and refinished decades from now. How to tell the two apart takes about ten seconds at the edge of any table, including one you already own.
• One table instead of three. A table that stays put for fifty years is a different quantity of furniture from three flat-pack ones bought a decade apart, and the difference is not close. That is also a claim — but it rests on how the thing is built rather than on where it came from, which makes it the kind of claim you can weigh for yourself.
• The old table does not go to the kerb. The trade-in takes it away in the same van the new one arrives in, credited against the price, and passes it on if it is sound. It is worth saying plainly that this exists partly because it sells tables. It also happens to be the difference between a working table staying in use and whatever else would have become of it.

None of that makes a tropical hardwood table a green purchase. It makes it a durable one — and durability is the part of the environmental argument that furniture almost always fails.

The container from Java

A Suar table crosses an ocean to reach a London dining room. That is sea freight, then a lorry, then a van — and solid timber is heavy, which is both the thing you are paying for and the thing that has to be moved. It is real carbon, and it sits on the other side of the ledger from everything in the section above.

There is no figure for it here. Nobody in this business has modelled it, and a number produced to reassure a reader is worse than no number at all — it looks like evidence while being the opposite. So: it is a cost, it is not small, and it is not quantified.

It would be easy to argue the freight away on a technicality. Every table here is already finished and standing in the UK; nothing is made to order, and the container that brought yours sailed long before you found this page. That is true, and it is still sophistry. Buying the table is what pays for the next container.

The honest position

So, in full: the rain tree is a reasonable species to make furniture from, and a materially better one than the slow tropical hardwoods that earned the category its reputation. The sourcing is what has been said here, and you have a stranger’s word for it and nothing more. The freight is real and unmeasured. The durability argument is the strongest one available, and it is strong.

If that is not enough, it should not be talked into being enough. The greenest dining table is one that already exists — second-hand, inherited, or the one currently in the room, sanded back and refinished for the price of an afternoon. That advice costs this business money every time somebody takes it, and it is still the correct advice.

And if it is enough, then the only version of this worth buying is the one you stop replacing. Buy the table you intend to keep for the rest of your life, look after it with the damp cloth that is the whole routine, and hand it on. We would rather you bought nothing than bought this on the strength of a paragraph.