Is there anything more beautiful than a majestic, full-grown hardwood tree? If I spot a particularly magnificent specimen, I’ll often stop the car, get out, and have a really good look at it. I usually have no trouble identifying the species, especially in the...

    Ever since I first discovered them as a young girl, I’ve been fascinated by Shaker furniture and buildings. A Christian sect founded in 18th century England, the Shakers came to colonial America in 1774 and began establishing communities in New England....

Reclaimed hardwood is a beautiful, sustainable material that can be used in many modern residential applications to create a sense of warmth, age, and texture. I particularly love its use in the kitchen and bath, two rooms where the need for clean, highly functional...

A few months ago, a friend in Southern California replaced all the interior doors in her 1970 suburban ranch house, switching out aging white-painted hollow-core doors for solid slabs of dark-stained American walnut. What an amazing transformation! Formerly rather...

Mel Smilow (1922–2002) was a Bronx-born furniture designer, manufacturer, and retailer. Smilow’s elegant midcentury-modern sofas and chairs, tables and case goods—handmade from solid American walnut, birch, and oak, rather than the more common teak of the time—were...

I’m a big fan of 17th-century Dutch genre paintings, simple domestic scenes from everyday life set in meticulously rendered middle-class interiors. One of my favorites is by Pieter de Hooch, an absolutely charming image of a mother doing something not so...

Leafing through a book of historic Tuscan villas, I was struck again and again by their masterful use of coffering. The coffered ceiling—a grid of beams and crossbeams with sunken panels filling the rectangles between them—has been around since ancient Greece and...

Here’s a hardwood project with enough wow factor to launch 2015—and the rest of the decade—into orbit. It’s a spectacular three-story floating circular staircase, a brand new feature in a recently renovated 100-year-old Tudor Revival house in Belmont, Massachusetts....

Dining banquettes are among my favorite pieces of built-in furniture. They can range in style from simple, cozy nooks that duplicate the everyday practicality of the traditional diner booth in your kitchen, all the way to long expanses of luxuriously upholstered...

It’s gift-giving season once again. This year I’ve found the range of items made of hardwood—from delightfully quirky children’s toys to exquisitely crafted turned vessels—is more extraordinary than ever. Here are six hardwood products I’ve already put on my holiday...