Wood is a vibrant, organic, breathing material that somehow remains alive. Each piece has its own unique characteristics and will tell you what it likes to become through its grain and form. George Nakashima believed that each tree has a perfect use and that it was his duty to find that use.He had an almost religious attitude that wood offers something beyond man and is "a gift we should treasure and use in the most logical and beautiful way."

We feel that the successful woodworker is one who reaches that level of sensitivity to the material and strives to hear the voice.

It is our preference to work with timber that we have harvested and/or saw milled ourselves. Woods like Poplar, Blackwood and Pine are locally harvested .Our main source of hardwoods are the indigenous timbers of the Knysna/Tsitsikama State forests. Two or three times a year, the Department of Forestry sell logs harvested from these forests on auction. Harvesting is done according to principles laid down by an international control organisation, the Forest Stewardship Council ( FSC) who aims to regulate the extraction and marketing of timbers derived from natural forests, thus ensuring sustainability of the resource. Logs get trucked to our sawmill where we cut the timber according to our requirements. All the indigenous timber we use is FSC certified - FSC Certification no. SGS-FM/COC 1231.

The grain of certain indigenous timbers can be quite dramatic. When such grain pattern gets revealed on the sawmill we sometimes decide on a project right there and saw the log so that the grain of the wood contribute to the overall design of the piece. This is in stark contrast to working with some of the bland woods like oak or beech where the grain doesn't "speak". With these species it is easy to superimpose a concept over the material as the result will be uniform.