Timber: Strength and Resilience in Interior Design

This delicious rustic ensemble is from FFDM’s Belvedere Collection.

Have you ever considered what properties of timber and wood you could use to beautify your home? Timber offers many qualities that you’d surely love – good insulation, natural beauty, light, safe, durable and strong. It also comes with a variety of engineered solutions. Timber is also a high-performance raw material that dense and with great thermal properties.

Timber Qualities That Rock

It is common for people to refer to timber as something that tough. Toughness is one of the leading abilities of timber that makes it almost unbreakable. Timber that comes with straight grains is a lot tougher than those with wavy or cross grains so be sure to look for knots, decays, cracks and other such defects when assessing the toughness of timber.

The hardness of timber can be measured in a lot of ways. The simplest is to gauge its resistance to nails, how easy or difficult it is to saw and work with it, and how well it can resist wear and tear. Both softwoods and hardwoods are mostly durable.

Timber also has thick cell walls while having small cell cavities. This only means that it is comprised of more wood than air. Balsa is a great example of light timber which has thinner cell walls and bigger air cavities.

The denser types of timber are more resistant to fire so they are partially fire resistant. Choosing to use lighter timber means you have to apply some chemical treatments that would add to its fire resistance. Be sure to look also for fire resistant paints.

Another quality of timber that is solely its own is its distinctive smell. There are certain oils that are present in timber that give off this woodsy scent. There are some people who are able to recognize timber by merely smelling its scent. Some of the scents are useful such as that of cedar and camphorwood which are insect-repellent. These kinds of wood, therefore, are best used in making cabinets, chests and wardrobes.

Be sure to steer clear from timbers that have unpleasant odors such as the Stinkwood and Australian walnut.

Timber also has interesting colors. The freshly-cut ones have a consistent color. The only way to seal this is to apply a coat of polish or wax as air exposure tends to alter the wood’s color. Depending on the kind of wood that you’re dealing with, it could either lighten or darken due to chemical change.

Orient Express Furniture Living Room Timber Small Round Coffee Table – Raw Metal 7721-S.RM.RWY

Timber In Your Home

Timber is surely one of the best materials that you can use for your interiors. There are many textures, colors, and combinations to choose from. For other people, this could be a cause for some headaches since they have many options to look at.

So you won’t be confused on what you really want, it’s important to remember a few fundamental principles in timber design –

When working with two types of wood, be sure to approach it by using the same tone and color. This is a great way to blend the two and achieve a different level of drama.
Find out whether you would want to connect every single room and present a balanced whole or if you would want to highlight features like doors and trims.
Use raw timber if you want to achieve a rustic appeal. At the other end of the spectrum is polished timber that can give you a modern, more high-end look.
Losing the timber’s color is easy but if you want to keep its texture, then be sure to paint thinly. Your goal is to still be able to see the grain still. The grain, after all, gives personality to your wood furniture.

Tags: McCreerys, McCreerys Home Furnishings, timber, timber furniture, timber interiors

This entry was posted on Friday, December 16th, 2016 at 9:09 am and is filed under Interior Design 101, Interior Design Elements, Interior Design Themes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Timber: Strength and Resilience in Interior Design

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