People arrive at the shed having already decided on walnut, because walnut photographs beautifully and because it is the expensive one. Sometimes they are right. More often the room decides differently once we have talked about it for ten minutes.
Start with the light
A north-facing room with cool, even daylight will make black walnut read as flat and brown-grey rather than the warm chocolate it looks like online. That same room does wonderful things for white oak, whose ray fleck needs raking light to show at all. A south-facing room with hard afternoon sun will drive cherry through its whole colour shift inside a single summer.
Then the use
Janka hardness is the number everyone quotes and the one that matters least for most pieces. White oak at 1,360 lbf and ash at 1,320 lbf are meaningfully tougher than cherry at 950 lbf, but a dining table does not fail because it dented — it gets marked, and a marked oiled top is a record of use rather than damage. If the piece will take genuine abuse, a hall bench or a child’s desk, take the oak. Otherwise choose on colour and grain and stop worrying.
Movement is the one nobody asks about
Walnut moves least across the grain of the four, which is why every wide single-slab door in the range is walnut and why we will build a 700 mm wide floating panel in it and not in oak. Oak at 10.5% tangential shrinkage is the liveliest, which is fine in a top that is buttoned and free to slide, and a problem in anything trapped in a frame.
And the price
Taking white oak as 1.00, ash comes in at about 0.85, cherry at 1.15 and walnut at 1.45. That is a board-foot cost passed straight through, not a markup for the name. A dining table in ash costs meaningfully less than the same table in walnut because the tree cost less, and for nothing else.