Why We Build With Pacific Coast Maple Instead of Shipping in Eastern Hardwood

People ask us about this more than you'd think — usually some version of "why maple, and why does it matter that it's from around here?" It's a fair question. Most furniture doesn't advertise where its wood came from, because most furniture is built from whatever's cheapest to source at scale, wherever that happens to be. We do it differently, and it's worth explaining why, especially since the alternative — plywood and imported hardwood — is what the rest of the industry runs on.

What big leaf maple actually is

If you're not from the Pacific Northwest, there's a decent chance you've never heard of it. Big leaf maple (Acer macrophyllum, also called Oregon maple) is the only maple species that grows to commercial size on the West Coast — it runs from southeast Alaska down through California, mostly along rivers and in the mixed forests west of the Cascades. It's a genuinely large tree, up to 100+ feet with trunks pushing three feet across, and it's slow enough growing that a mature one can be over a century old.

The wood itself is light reddish-brown, tight-grained, and moderately hard — hard enough to hold up as furniture, not so hard that it fights you in the shop. Some boards come out with a quilted or figured grain that's genuinely striking, the kind of pattern that shows up in high-end guitar tops and piano frames when the tree produces it. Most of what we build with is straight-grained and clean, but every so often a board comes through the shop that stops everyone for a second.

The sustainability case, without the greenwashing

Here's the honest version, not the marketing version: big leaf maple isn't an endangered or over-harvested species. It's not on any watch list, and it's actually the second-most abundant native hardwood in the Pacific Northwest behind red alder. Foresters here have said for years that it's more available than the furniture industry actually uses — a lot of it gets left standing or turned into pulp and pallets because there hasn't been strong commercial demand for it as furniture-grade lumber, even though it's well suited for it.

That's part of why we like building with it. We're not competing for a scarce resource shipped in from somewhere under pressure — we're using a regionally abundant hardwood that's been historically underused for exactly the kind of furniture we make. Buying it also supports the logic of using a tree for what it's naturally good at, rather than hauling something else across the country because it's more familiar.

What "local supply chain" actually buys you, beyond the feel-good part

It's easy to wave at "local" as a marketing word. The practical reasons we care about it are less abstract:

Less time between forest and shop. Lumber that travels a few hundred miles instead of a few thousand means less time sitting in transit, less handling, and a shorter chain of hands between the tree and the board that ends up on your bench. Fewer links in that chain means fewer chances for quality to slip.

We can actually see what we're buying. Sourcing regionally means relationships with mills and suppliers we know, not blind purchase orders from a distributor three time zones away. When a batch of maple comes in, we know roughly what forest it came out of and who cut it. That matters more than it sounds like it should, especially when we're picking boards for something that's supposed to last decades.

Lower shipping footprint, plainly. A board of maple from a couple hundred miles away has a fraction of the transportation footprint of hardwood freighted in from the eastern half of the country, or overseas plywood shipped by container. This isn't the whole sustainability story, but it's a real and simple part of it.

Why we don't build with just plywood, and what that actually costs us

Plywood is cheap, stable, and easy to work with, which is exactly why most furniture — including a lot of "wood" furniture that's actually just plywood with a veneer skin — is built from it. We don't use it structurally, and it's worth being honest about the tradeoff: plywood is genuinely more dimensionally stable than solid wood. It doesn't expand and contract with humidity the way a solid board does, because the cross-laminated layers fight that movement. We use it in small amounts and only in strategic places to prevent any warping during the changes in season. Always keeping your turntable steady. 

It doesn't take a repair or refinish well — you can't sand out a ding and re-oil a piece of plywood furniture the way you can with solid wood. And it has a ceiling on how long it lasts that solid lumber doesn't, because once the layers start separating, that's structural, not cosmetic. That is why the majority of our pieces especially the parts you see and touch the most are all made from solid wood. 

Solid maple moves a little with the seasons. We think that's a fair trade for furniture that can be sanded, re-oiled, and handed down instead of replaced.

Eastern hardwoods aren't a bad choice — they're just not the local one

We want to be fair here: species like eastern walnut, cherry, and oak are excellent furniture woods, and plenty of great furniture is built from them. Nothing about big leaf maple is objectively "better" wood than a well-sourced eastern hardwood. The difference is entirely about what's growing where we are.

If we were a shop in Vermont or North Carolina, we'd probably be building with the hardwood in our own backyard instead of importing Pacific maple across the country — that would be the version of this same argument, just pointed the other direction. The point was never "maple beats walnut." It's that building with what's actually growing near your shop, instead of defaulting to whatever's the industry standard shipped in from somewhere else, is both a better environmental choice and, frankly, a more honest one. You end up with furniture that's genuinely tied to the region it was built in, not just labeled that way.

That's the whole philosophy in one sentence: build with what's actually around you, and don't ship in what you don't need to.

— Matt & the crew at WickerWoodWorks, Portland, OR