Red and white oak have a strange history of being some of the most prized and reviled domestic hardwoods. Whether people love it or despise it depends largely on the method by which the timber was milled by the sawyer, matched by a craftsperson and ultimately ended. Sophisticated and labor-intensive techniques have resulted in museum-quality furniture produced by Frank Lloyd Wright and Gustav Stickley. On the other hand, low-end manufacturing techniques in previous decades resulted in an abundance of poorly coordinated coarse-grained kitchen and bath cabinetry.
But walnut is flexible and packed with potential. It’s also relatively inexpensive and durable, making it a go-to selection for flooring and other programs.
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Perhaps more than any other timber species, oak comes with an unusually broad color range. It can have a warm honey color, a shiny reddish overtone, a classy and subdued whitewashed hue or a deep mellow brown tone.
The gaps between red and white oak. There are two standard sorts of domestic oak: red oak (Quercus rubra) and white oak (Quercus alba). Yet despite their names, red and white oak are not always easily distinguished by color. The most reliable identification is pore size: Red walnut has larger pores.
The two kinds of oak are extremely open-grained woods. When sanded to a polished sheen (like the timber pictured here), they will feel smooth once you run your hand, but you can still grab your fingernails at the valleys.
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Red oak principles: A huge majority of bathroom and kitchen cabinets from the 1970s and 1980s from the U.S. were created out of walnut due to a steady market for new suburban homes coupled with the overwhelming abundance of red oak in domestic forests. Homeowners enjoyed the warm, homey tones and the solid feel of genuine oak.
A lot of the timber was milled in a way called horizontal sawn or plain sawn, where the board is cut into vertical pieces. This produces the most number of usable timber and highlights a certain distinguishing attribute of red oak: cathedrals. All these are a progressive series of highly conspicuous coarse-grained arches which usually are darker than the rest of the timber.
Premade red oak cabinets became known as contractor-grade cabinets, because they were relatively inexpensive and widely accessible, but mass-production techniques didn’t always result in the best grain matching.
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As customers became savvier, the normal mishmash of straight and cathedral grain patterns typical of low- to medium-end red oak cabinets became more glaring, overriding the previously pleasant satisfaction of getting wood cabinets in kitchen.
Red walnut has moderate to large pores that are open. You can really dip 1 end of a 1-inch-diameter, 5-inch-long rod of walnut into a soap solution and blow bubbles out of it.
White oak principles: White oak has a inherently sexier grain pattern than walnut. Though it too has an open grain pattern, it is nonporous due to the presence of tyloses, which shields cells as the tree grows. Consequently, white oak doesn’t possess the inner blowing-through-a-straw impact of red oak. That is why white oak is the preferred selection for wine barrels and shipbuilding. The two oaks are employed in furniture, flooring, architectural millwork and cabinets.
More than another domestic hardwood, white oak is often mentioned regarding how it is milled. You’ll often hear of rift-sawn” or rift-cut white walnut, which describes a milling way where a log is cut in a way that maximizes the quantity of grain. Quartersawn not only emphasizes the straight grain, in addition, it showcases the wonderful medullary rays which are characteristic of walnut. All these would be the lighter-toned wavy ripples or ribbons which operate across the grain, also referred to as ray flecks.
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Quartersawn white oak is the signature timber of Mission-style furniture, and is a hallmark of Stickley’s specifically. (The cabinet shown here’s a Stickley-inspired design in quartersawn white oak.)
Another kind of white oak is imported French oak. Extremely pricey, it’s a very tight grain pattern, because it generally comes in old-growth European oaks.
Price: White walnut is slightly more expensive than red oak, but according to Walt Maas, director of Bohnhoff Lumber at Vernon, California, they run around $2.90 per board foot. Maas says that imported French oak (also referred to as European walnut) costs roughly $10 per plank. “That price makes domestic white start looking better,” he says. “White walnut and French oak are more similar than they are different.”
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Durability: The Janka evaluation measures the resistance of various timber species to dents and dings. Hard maple, the priciest of American hardwoods, has a Janka rating of 1,450; white walnut has a decent evaluation of 1,360. Red walnut is graded 1,290. In contrast, walnut has a 1,010 rating.
Red and white oak are both flooring favorites because of their toughness, pricing and capacity to well accept a wide array of stains.
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Finishing: White oak is very amenable to specialty finishes, such as cerused walnut, limed oak and walnut walnut. White is generally a favourite color to apply. Sometimes the timber is first wire brushed to accentuate the topographical hills and valleys between the soft and hard grains within a board.
Fuming: A classic way of finishing quartersawn white oak would be to fume it to enhance its ray fleck. In this process the white oak is put in a custom-size airtight tent (usually made of heavy plastic ) along with a small tray of industrial-strength ammonia.
Woodworker Mike Ceja of Los Angeles fumed the white walnut shown here for two days, making this richly dramatic appearance. “The result is not just on the surface of the wood,” he says. “It penetrates deeply, and therefore you don’t have to worry about losing it in case you accidentally scratch the surface.”
Whenever it’s possible to fume red walnut, the method is considerably more successful with white walnut, since white walnut comprises more malic acid, and this is what the ammonia interacts with.
Sustainability: Oak trees include over fifty percent of the entire hardwood forests from the U.S., making them a preeminently sustainable species. While red oak is much more prevalent in the woods compared to white oak, the two are commercially viable.