A Table or a Cut List: What Each of Our Woods Is For

The question I get more than almost any other is some version of "which is better, the Saman or the teak?" It's a fair question and it has a slightly annoying answer: they aren't competing. In my building they do two completely different jobs. One of them you buy finished, as an object, a piece at a time. The other you buy by the board foot and build with. So instead of ranking them, let me tell you plainly what each one is for.

The short version

Saman — the same wood sold as monkeypod or parota depending on who's selling it — is what my live-edge Saman tables are made from. Wide single slabs, finished, sold as individual pieces.

Ecuadorian plantation teak (Tectona grandis) is lumber. Kiln-dried — 100 percent. Surfaced two sides. Sold on 4/4 nominal board feet, tally at loading. You buy it the way a shop buys material, and you take it from there.

Saman is about width

Saman grows fast, wide and low. The tree throws out an enormous spreading crown on a short, heavy trunk, and that trunk is where the slabs come from. That shape is the entire reason the wood matters to anybody: it produces single boards wide enough to be a dining table on their own, without gluing several narrow pieces edge to edge to fake the width.

That's what you're buying. Not a species with magic properties — width, in one piece, with the tree's own edge left on it. Along with that width comes character: the pale outer wood meeting the dark chocolate core in a two-tone sweep across the top, bark inclusions where a limb once grew, the occasional void. Those are features of the material, not defects in it, and no two slabs carry them the same way. Finishes vary slab to slab, so each listing states its finish.

What Saman is for, then: a dining table, a conference or boardroom table, a communal top in a restaurant, a desk, a long console. Anything where you want one piece of wood to be the thing people notice when they walk into the room. What it is not for is filling a cut list. I don't sell Saman as dimensioned stock for a shop to break down — I sell it as tables.

Teak is about what your shop does next

Teak comes to you in the opposite condition: not finished, on purpose. It's kiln-dried and surfaced two sides, which means the faces have been run so you can see the wood, read the color and stack it flat. It does not mean it's ready to install. Your shop still straightens an edge, takes it to final thickness, and cuts your parts. Anyone who tells you imported lumber arrives ready to go is describing a different business than mine.

It's sold on 4/4 nominal board feet, with the tally taken at loading, so you're buying volume rather than pieces.

What shops actually do with it: face frames, door and drawer fronts, interior trim and millwork, panel glue-ups, and small work — knife scales, boxes, turning blanks and case parts. The reason they come back to it is a combination of the color and the way it behaves under a cutter. Teak machines cleanly and burnishes to a smooth, almost waxy surface. One practical note that saves people grief: the same natural oils that make it feel that way interfere with adhesive, so wipe joint surfaces with a solvent right before you spread glue. Standard practice with this species, and cheap insurance.

So which one do you need?

Ask what you're holding. If you're holding a room — a dining room that needs a table, an office that needs a boardroom top — you need Saman, and the decision is about length, width and how the piece sits in the space. If you're holding a cut list, a drawing or a client's millwork package, you need teak lumber, and the decision is about board feet and what your shop can process.

Plenty of my buyers need both, and not always in the same week. A cabinet shop doing a kitchen in teak gets a call from the same client about a Saman table for the breakfast area. That's one visit and one phone number either way, which is most of the reason I stock both.

What they do have in common

Both are solid wood, and solid wood moves. Midwest winters run dry and Midwest summers run humid, and a table or a run of cabinets will respond to that seasonally no matter which species it came from. Build and install accordingly — that's a longer subject and I'll write it up on its own.

The other thing they share is how they got here. I import both directly, container-lot, and sell them out of my own Chicago warehouse. There's no distributor between the two of us adding a layer of guesswork, which means when you ask me what a piece is, you're asking the person who bought it.

How to buy each one

For a table: every slab is individual, so the listing is the spec — dimensions and finish are stated per piece. Come see it if you can. I'll walk you around the stack and you can put your hands on the edges. If you can't get here, call me and I'll describe what's in front of me honestly, including whatever you'd rather not hear.

For Ecuadorian teak lumber: bring or send your list and we'll work it against what's on the racks, tally-based, pulled with you standing there if you want to be.

Either way you get me. I'm Norman Jimenez, I answer my own phone, and I'd rather talk you out of the wrong piece than sell it to you. (773) 584-7334, or info@platinumluxuryteak.com.