How palmwood is made

Every piece of Pacific Green furniture starts as a coconut palm that has stopped bearing fruit. Not a rainforest tree, not a plantation hardwood grown for timber — a palm at the end of a working life of about seventy years, standing on land that cannot be replanted until it comes down.

The tree

A coconut palm grows to around 25 metres, on a slender trunk averaging about 300 mm across. It fruits for roughly seventy years. After that it is felled so the land can be replanted — which is what happens to millions of palms across the tropics every year, mostly by burning.

Pacific Green's founders, Bruce Dowse and Peter Ryan, came across vast abandoned coconut plantations in the South Pacific in 1986 — commercially planted in the early 1900s and long past fruiting. They built what they describe as the world's first factory dedicated to the coconut palm, on leased land, employing people from the surrounding villages. The barren plantation land went back to those villages to be replanted with young fruit-bearing palms and other crops.

A timber with no growth rings

Palmwood is not a hardwood in the botanical sense and it does not behave like one. A palm has no annual growth rings, no heartwood, no rays and no branches — so the timber has no knots and none of the flaws that come with them. What it has instead is thousands of dark vascular bundles running the length of the trunk, which read as a dense fleck rather than a grain. It is the reason a palmwood surface looks like nothing else, and the reason no two pieces are patterned alike.

It is also hard. Coconut timber measures a Janka ball hardness of roughly 1,600 to 2,200 psi, against about 1,000 to 1,200 psi for oak. That is the practical difference you feel in a dining table: it resists a dropped fork where oak dents.

Three timbers in one trunk

Density in a palm is not uniform. It is highest at the outside of the trunk and falls away towards the centre — roughly 600 to 900 kg per cubic metre at the dermal layer, 400 to 600 in the middle, and 200 to 400 at the core. So the trunk is effectively three materials, and which part goes where matters. The dense outer timber is what belongs in a table top, a chair frame or a leg carrying weight. Milling a palm well means knowing the trunk rather than treating it as one board.

How the pieces are made

The furniture is built by hand, a few days to a piece. Palmwood is combined with full-grain Italian leather, cast bronze fittings, feather down and latex. The finishing oils are natural. Sawdust from the factory goes out as agricultural fertiliser rather than waste.

Because the material is cut from individual trunks and finished by hand, two pieces of the same design are never identical — the fleck, the depth of the colour and the way the oil sits all vary. This is the point of it, not a tolerance.

Living with palmwood

Palmwood is a natural, oiled timber. It wants to be kept out of direct sun and away from a heating vent, dusted with a dry cloth, and re-oiled occasionally. Leather and bronze each have their own needs. Full instructions are on our care and maintenance page.

See it in person

Photographs flatten palmwood. The fleck, the weight and the way a finished surface catches light are all things you have to stand next to. We hold stock across two Sydney showrooms, so most of the range can be seen and sat in — see what is in stock, or plan a visit.

Call us on 1800 722 753 or email hello@swayhome.com.au.