Steel furniture vs wood furniture

Most furniture is made from wood, or from materials that started as wood. This is not unreasonable. Wood has been furniture's primary material for as long as there has been furniture, and solid timber, well-jointed, is genuinely excellent. I have no quarrel with it.

The first thing I like about steel is what you can do with section size. A steel bracket can be very thin relative to the load it carries — much thinner than wood would allow. There is something satisfying about a component that is doing more than it appears to be doing. It looks considered rather than overbuilt. This is a distinction worth caring about, even if most people don't know exactly why they care about it.

The second is consistency. Steel doesn't swell with humidity or shift with temperature the way timber does. Its properties are predictable, which means parts can be manufactured to tight tolerances and stay that way. For components that need to fit together reliably over many years, in different homes and different climates, this matters. Wood, by contrast, has opinions about the weather.

The third is reassembly. A threaded connection in wood degrades with use — the fibres compress, the thread loses purchase. A threaded steel connection, properly designed, doesn't degrade. You can take it apart and put it back together indefinitely. For a system built around reconfigurability, that isn't a minor point. It's the reason the promise is keepable.

Then there's powder coating. Harder than most wood surfaces, closer in character to automotive paint than anything typically found on flat-pack furniture. It holds colour well and takes abuse quietly. Both qualities are useful in a home.

Finally, steel is substantially more recyclable than composite wood products, which are difficult to separate back into anything useful. I won't claim to know the full carbon footprint comparison — there are too many variables, and I have learned to be suspicious of anyone who answers that question with great confidence. But on end-of-life recyclability, steel is well ahead.

We chose steel because it let us make something slender, precise, and genuinely reconfigurable. Those were the requirements. Steel met them rather well.