Solid wood versus veneer — which is actually better

The honest answer, depending on which kind of question you're asking, is either — and we want to be fair to veneer before we tell you why we don't use it.

A veneer is a thin layer of decorative timber, usually less than a millimetre thick, glued onto a substrate of MDF, plywood or particleboard. Done well, on the right piece, it can look beautiful. It is dimensionally stable in a way solid timber isn't, since the substrate doesn't move with the seasons. It is also rather more affordable, because the underlying material is cheap and the precious wood is reduced to a thin skin.

Where veneer fails is over time, and at the edges. The top is only as resilient as that thin skin. Drag a heavy serving dish across it and you'll mark it. Catch the edge with a knife and you'll chip it through to the substrate, exposing a band of pale composite that no amount of polishing will hide. Spill a generous quantity of red wine on it and let it sit, and the moisture will eventually find its way to the substrate and lift the veneer. The piece looks fine on day one. It looks tired after five years and outright sad after ten. (Our note on why so many tables look good online and let you down at home covers a wider set of related disappointments.)

Solid timber is the opposite. It marks, but the marks are part of it. A glass leaves a faint ring. A knife leaves a small score. A spilled candle leaves a soft scorch. Each is something you live with rather than something you hide. The piece develops what people who know about furniture call a patina — a softness, a depth, a sense of having been in the world. Twenty years in, a solid wood table looks better than it did the day it left us. A veneered one does not.

There are also engineering reasons for solid timber, which we won't bore you with at length, except to note that a 50mm solid top simply behaves differently from a 19mm veneered substrate — heavier, calmer, less prone to flex. (More on that in what makes a dining table feel sturdy and well made.)

We use solid timber, fifty millimetres thick, breadboard ends, kiln-dried to below 5% moisture. It is more expensive to make, harder to finish, and heavier to deliver. We don't see another way to do it properly.