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Heartgrain Home Solid hardwood, cut and joined by hand
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Raked light across the open grain of a planed white oak board

Est. 2009 — Cutter’s Bend

Furniture with a grain direction

We build in white oak, black walnut, cherry and ash — dried to seven per cent, joined with tenons and dovetails, and finished in oil you can repair yourself.

See the whole range Compare the timbers

Every piece is made to order at one bench. Nothing is stocked, nothing is veneered, and nothing leaves the shed above 8% moisture content.

  • Made at one bench

    Two people and a drying shed. No production line, no bought-in parts.

  • Ten-year guarantee

    Structural cover on every joint we cut, transferable with the piece.

  • Delivered and placed

    Our own crew within 300 miles, insured freight beyond it.

  • Repairable for life

    An oil finish you mend with a cloth, not a stripping tank.

A bedroom with a low oak platform bed and a panelled headboard in morning light

Why solid

A veneered panel has one good year in it. A solid board has eighty.

Almost everything sold as wooden furniture is a thin skin of timber over particleboard. It photographs identically to the real thing and it behaves nothing like it: you cannot plane out a scratch, you cannot re-oil it, and once the edge chips there is no repair, only replacement.

Everything on this site is solid hardwood right through. That imposes limits, and those limits are what the joinery is for. Panels float. Tops are buttoned. Wide doors are broken into narrow battens. None of it is decoration.

See the whole range

Selected

On the bench this season

Eight pieces that show the range: the tables we are known for, the cases that took longest to get right.

All twenty pieces

The four timbers

Everything we build comes out of one of these four

The same figures we use at the bench when we choose a board. Switch the scale to see where each timber wins.

White Oak 1360 lbf
Black Walnut 1010 lbf
Black Cherry 950 lbf
White Ash 1320 lbf

Janka side hardness — the load needed to press a steel ball half its diameter into the face. Higher resists denting better.

Hardness and density are published averages for kiln-dried stock; movement figures are green-to-oven-dry. Your board will vary.

  • White Oak Our workhorse. Closed tyloses make it the one white oak that will hold water, which is also why it takes an oil finish so evenly.
  • Black Walnut The most dimensionally settled of the four. It moves least across the grain, so we reserve it for wide single-slab doors.
  • Black Cherry Move a bowl off a new cherry table for a fortnight and you will leave a pale ghost behind. It evens out. Be patient.
  • White Ash Springy and tough enough to steam-bend, which is why every curved crest rail in the range is ash.

The range

Eleven kinds of thing

From a dining table down to a wool rug, all of it built or sourced to sit in the same room together.

A hand plane resting on a half-finished oak board, shavings beside it

The bench

One shed, four hands, no production line.

We are two people and a drying shed. That is the whole operation, and it is why the lead times on this site are long and honest.

Everything is levelled by machine and finished by hand — the last pass on any surface is a plane, not a sander. Boards air-dry stickered for two years before they see the kiln, and the kiln only takes them the last four points.

Inside the workshop

How it works

From a tape measure to a delivered piece

Four stages, and you hear from us at every one of them.

  1. Tell us the room

    Send the alcove width, the ceiling height and a photograph. If a stock size is 80 mm out, say so.

  2. We quote and schedule

    A fixed price, a real lead time and the boards we intend to use, in writing before anything is cut.

  3. It is built and photographed

    You see the piece finished on the bench before it is wrapped, and you can still change your mind.

  4. Delivered and placed

    Carried in, levelled in position and the packaging taken away again. No kerbside drops.

A cloth working oil into the surface of a finished tabletop

Living with it

The finish is meant to be mended, not protected.

A hardwax oil sits in the wood rather than on it, so a scratch is a local problem with a local answer: clean it, re-oil it, and by the next morning you will struggle to find it.

Re-oil high-traffic surfaces once in the first six months, then about once a year. That is the whole maintenance schedule.

Care and repair

In their rooms

What people say once it is in the house

  • They talked me out of the size I asked for and into the one that actually fits. Four years on it has not moved a millimetre.

    Marianne Holt Halden table — Kirkby

  • A hot pan left a ring on the cherry. They posted a card of oil and a cloth and told me which way to rub. It is gone.

    Peter Ansell Fenwick table — Two Rivers

  • Eleven weeks was eleven weeks. Two of them carried it up a spiral staircase and did not scratch the wall.

    Dela Osei Elmsworth armoire — Marren

Journal

Notes from the shed

Longer answers to the three questions we get asked most.

Come and see it

Bring a drawing. We will tell you what the wood will let you do.

Most of what we build starts as somebody standing in the shed with a phone photograph and a tape measure. If a stock size is 80 mm out for your alcove, say so — changing a length is a different job from changing a design, and only one of them costs extra.

+1 555 240 1180 bench@example.com

Bench open to visitors Thursday to Saturday, 10:00 – 16:00. Please write ahead.

Rough-sawn hardwood boards air-drying in a timber shed, stickered between layers