marquetry and parquetry
These are techniques used to make our pieces of furniture into one of a kind art works. With these techniques it allows us to create pattens and shapes from solid wood veneers to form patterns such as starburst, continuous grain, book matching, the list goes on.
The use of veneers has been seen over recent year to be the “cheap” way of making furniture yet history shows that the finest of pieces will contain some form of marquetry or inlay. There are many reasons other than a one off design why marquetry is used, for example timber moves due to humidity changes causing gaps to open/close or shaking/ cracking in large solid piece. When veneer is applied to a stable material this reduces the movement as each piece expands/contracts less forming a long lasting piece of furniture.
Marquetry and Parquetry is commonly paired with inlay, this is where we machine groove/shapes out of an item like a table top and replace it with another such as mother of pearl, precious metals or other solid materials.
The use of veneer allows us to a wide range of materials from standard timbers such as oak, ash, walnut to exotic timbers such as large burs, ebony macassar, ripple sycamore and many more.
The use of veneers comes in a range of thicknesses, from 0.5mm to 3mm structural veneers, this links to our method for manufacturing curved furniture where we use structural veneers to ensure continuous grain direction to maximise strength and the aesthetics of the grain to look as though it is formed from one piece of timber.
