The Weirdness of the wood

A simple suggestion from a contractor about door veneers struck the right balance between boring and weird for a style-conscious firm of London solicitors.

"The client didn't want a standard veneer," said John Rowland, project director for contractor Ibex Interiors. "They wanted to get away from the bog standard routine of door-after-door looking the same. They wanted some panache."

The décor is stark. White dominates. So the partners wanted the doors to stand out.

The architect presented a number of samples, and the client settled on an European ash (see details below). The problem was that the defining feature of this veneer is its stripy grain. The effect is a little too stromg for some tastes.

Some of the solicitors were all for taking a walk on the wild side, but the head of facilities expressed some concern, fearing that visitors would find the doors just too jarring.

Rowland came up with a solution. The doors go around a central core of the offices at 5 Chancery Lane, London. He suggested using two logs per floor, and arranging the panels in the order of cutting so that the logs reveal themselves as you progress around the floor.

"As you walk it makes sense," Rowland said. "You see the grain opening then closing. Otherwise you would have had an exaggerated variation. It's simple and it gives the client a good story to tell its clients."

The logs of Fraxinus Excelsior were sourced from central European forests, and sliced into veneers in Italy. It's a whitish-yellow timber with brown heartwood. The logs are visually distinctive because the heartwood has spread to the whole diameter of the tree. They are sliced into 0.55mm-wide sheets. Six logs will suffice for the 200 doors.