Suar vs oak vs walnut: which to choose

Suar, oak and walnut are the three woods this catalogue is built from, and the comparison between them nearly always gets made on hardness — the one number that changes least about living with the table. The number that decides most of it is width. It is why some of these tops are one piece of tree and some are boards, and it sits behind most of the price difference as well.

Suar, oak and walnut: what each one is

Suar is Samanea saman, the rain tree — also sold as monkey pod, raintree or albizia, which is four names for one tree and a fair share of the confusion in this category. It is the broad shade tree of Java, and it spreads rather than climbs: a mature trunk gives a board wide enough to eat off, in one piece. The colour is effectively two woods in one board — rust and near-black through the heart, pale cream at the sapwood, with an unusually hard line drawn between them.

Oak is the wood most of us are picturing when we picture a dining table at all. It has been the working surface of English and European households for centuries and it behaves the way that history suggests — straight, even grain running quietly down the length of a board, a colour between pale stone and honey, and the hardest surface of the three.

Walnut is the timber cabinetmakers have kept for their best work for three centuries. The heartwood runs deep chocolate with a cool depth beneath it, and the grain moves the way slow water does, gathering to near-black where the tree worked hardest. It is also the narrowest of the three, and that turns out to matter more than anything else on this page.

The three, side by side

Hardness, colour and how a timber ages are properties of the species, so they are written down. The last two columns are not: the widest single-piece top and the opening price are read out of the catalogue as this page loads, which is why they agree with the product pages rather than approximately resembling them.

Width is the axis nobody compares on

A live-edge top is a board cut lengthways through a trunk, so its width is the tree’s width less the bark. That is the whole constraint, and it is not negotiable by anyone. A top that seats six along its long sides has to come from a trunk that wide — and most trees are not that wide. Oak rarely is. Walnut almost never is.

Suar is. The rain tree puts out a canopy far broader than the trunk is tall, and one mature butt yields a dining-width board on its own. That single habit explains most of what a buyer sees in this category: the wide single-slab tables are usually suar, and the same table in oak or walnut is usually several live-edge boards jointed along their length.

A top that seats eight has to come from a tree that seats eight.

None of that is a ranking. A jointed top is solid hardwood the whole way down, it can be sanded and refinished decades from now, and it is how most fine furniture has been built for as long as there has been fine furniture — the longer version of that argument has its own page. But it is the fact behind the shape of this catalogue, so it is recorded piece by piece rather than glossed over:

• Suar. The Estuary — one slab; The Tempest — one slab; The Cascade — one slab, waterfall fall; The Cataract — one slab, sculpted fall.
• Oak. The Riverbed — one slab, resin-stilled fissures; The Ravine — live-edge boards, joined.
• Walnut. The Highland — live-edge boards, joined; The Rift — two boards, resin channel.

Read that list the other way round and it is a map of the timber. The suar tops are single widths because the tree gives them; the oak and walnut tops reach dining width the way those species have always had to.

Colour, under the light a room actually has

Photographs flatten this, so it is worth saying plainly. Oak hands light back. It is the palest of the three and its grain is even enough not to interrupt a wall or a floor, which is why it suits a north-facing room, a small room, or an interior that already carries its colour elsewhere. It is the one timber here that makes a room feel larger rather than fuller.

Walnut absorbs light instead. A walnut top is the darkest thing most rooms will ever hold, and it anchors everything else — pale walls, light chairs, glass and brass all sharpen against it. In a room with light to spare that is exactly what you want; in a room already short of it, keep the chairs and textiles light and let the table carry the weight.

Suar does neither quietly. Pale sapwood runs down both live edges and dark, figured heartwood weathers through the middle, and that contrast reads as pattern from across a room rather than as colour. It is the timber to choose when the table is meant to be the thing you notice, and the one to leave alone when it is not.

What ten years does

All three move, and not in the same direction, which is the part most comparisons leave out. Oak starts pale and warms towards a deeper honey over the first few years, evenly and without drama. Walnut lightens rather than darkens — a mellowing towards warm honey-brown that genuinely surprises people who bought it for the depth. Suar keeps its colours and softens the line between them, so a top that arrives strongly two-toned settles over the years into something more of a piece.

The sealed finish slows all three without stopping any of them, and it should. The only thing worth avoiding is hard, direct sun falling across one half of a top for years, because that half moves faster than the other; moving whatever lives on the surface from time to time is the entire precaution. The rest is on the care page.

Hardness matters less than the ranking suggests

Oak at around 1,120 lbf, walnut at roughly 1,010 lbf, suar at about 850 lbf: that is the order, and it is real. It is also measured on bare timber, and none of these tops is bare. Every wood table here carries a multi-layer PU and melamine seal, a film sitting over the wood, so what a plate or a glass or a sleeve actually meets is the finish. Day to day, the species underneath is not the surface being tested.

Where the ranking does show is force. A hard knock — a dropped pan, a biro pressed through one sheet of paper — carries through the film into the wood beneath, and there suar, the softest of the three by a clear margin, dents where oak simply would not. It shows up as denting rather than scratching, which is worth knowing before rather than after.

And the film makes one trade in the other direction, which the care guide states rather than buries: a sealed finish cannot be spot-repaired at home the way an oiled top can, because the repair would sit proud of the surface around it. What you get for that is a top which resists the mark in the first place and asks for nothing but a damp cloth — no oiling, no waxing, no seasonal ritual.

Three price scales, not one

The three timbers do not run on a single ladder, so comparing them by their opening figures compares the wrong thing. Each scale answers to what that species costs at that width, and within a timber the build moves the number as much as the size does. Two examples from this catalogue, both read live rather than quoted.

In oak, everything else matches — same species, same sealed finish, same blackened steel frame, each sold in one fixed size. The Ravine, live-edge boards, joined, is £1,800. The Riverbed, a single width of oak, is £3,000. Nothing stands between those two figures except how many pieces the top is made from, which is another way of saying how wide the tree was.

In walnut the same logic produces something that looks, at a glance, the wrong way round. The Highland is live-edge boards, joined in one fixed size, 240 × 100 cm, at £2,400. The Rift is a river table — two boards, resin channel — offered across a full size scale, opening at £1,895 and reaching £3,850 at 320 × 110 cm. Set those two headline figures beside each other and they are not describing the same thing: one is a finished table, the other is the floor of a range.

Choosing, in three sentences

Choose suar when the table is meant to be the thing you notice — the widest figure of the three, a full dining top from one tree, and a surface that marks a little more readily in exchange. Choose oak when the room already has its character and the table’s job is to hold it steady: palest, hardest, and the one that gives light back to a small or north-facing space. Choose walnut when the room is composed and wants a centre of gravity, and you would rather the depth than the drama.

Timber questions