Most people walk into a timber yard or open a supplier website and pick the species that looks best in the photo. That is the wrong order. The right order is to work out how the room behaves first: how much sun hits the table, how hard the heating runs in winter, whether the floor is level, and whether the table sits under a window. A timber that survives a dark Fitzroy terrace will cup in a bright new build with hydronic heating and no curtains. Ash is the easy recommendation for a first solid timber table. It is pale, tight-grained, machines cleanly and takes a hard-wax oil beautifully. Blackbutt is harder and darker with more colour variation, which is great if you want the table to have some presence but a nuisance if you are chasing a uniform look. Spotted gum is the toughest of the three and the most stable in service, but its grain does its own thing and no two boards match. If a client tells me they want the timber to look like the showroom sample, I steer them away from spotted gum every time. Recycled Messmate is a different story. It is often sixty to eighty years old, fully seasoned, and it moves less than new timber because it has already been through decades of Victorian weather. The catch is that old nail holes, splits and grey surface timber need to be cut out before you get to the good stuff. Expect to lose between twenty and thirty percent of the board. The payoff is a table with a depth of colour that new timber just does not have. Whatever you choose, ask for the moisture content reading on the exact boards you are getting. Anything above twelve percent and you are gambling on a table that cups within two winters. Below eight percent and the timber has been dried too hard and can be brittle to machine. For a dining table in this climate, eight to ten percent is the sweet spot, and any honest mill will give you the reading without being asked twice.

Written by the Dealspot showroom team in Cremorne

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