Great care needs to be taken when buying Oak furniture

Traditionally, Oak has been the choice for the finest pieces of furniture using the very best craftmanship.

Today however, whilst the is of course just as good, many cheaper manufacturers are using it to make poor quality furniture.

We’ll take you through the process with reference to our Kingswood range of Solid Oak furniture as the gold standard.

You may well have noticed various shops selling what looks like our Kingswood range online and in competitors stores. At first glance they look identical, however on closer inspection you can see the corners that have been cut to get the price down resulting in an interior product that won’t last as long.

Firstly, our Kingswood range has Oak drawer carcasses throughout the range. When you open a drawer, the whole drawer, front, back and sides is make of Oak, the cheap copies use pine.

Secondly, Kingswood has a slightly tapered leg at the bottom whereas the cheap copies have a straight leg.

Thirdly, Kingswood backs are made of solid wood, whereas the cheap copies are made of MDF or even hardboard.

And of course there will be other shortcuts in the manufacturing process of the copies that make the piece less structurally sound.

Not all Veneer is bad.

Thanks to Oak Furnitureland’s “No Veneer In ‘Ere” advertising, veneers have got a bad name.

There are different sorts of veneer and different places to use veneer, some are bad, some are good.

Let’s start with what veneer is.

Veneer is simply a thin piece of material glued onto a piece of board.

Bad Veneers are either pretend (paper, plastic etc) or very thin (less than 1mm).

Good Veneers are solid Oak to a good thickness (greater than 1mm, the thicker the better)

Bad places to put veneer are in the structure of the piece (legs, crossmembers etc) and anywhere where you can see the edge as it will chip off.

Good places to put veneers are floating panels as this will stop cracking.