Our wood is mostly grown in the Alps. Solid wood furniture, made from Alpine wood, is full of life, because Alpine woods are exposed to all kinds of weather and are therefore more resistant than conventional woods. Well-grown wood, especially when felled at the right time, still contains nature and vitality in all its fibers. Even after processing, you can still feel this.
All woods come from controlled and sustainable forestry. We at 4betterdays.com actively support this. We recently put our promise into action and planted trees in cooperation with the Austrian Federal Forests. Our customers and fans contributed with a like and share on social media channels by determining the number of seedlings. So it was said to our team: "Get out of the office and get to planting trees".
All woods come from controlled and sustainable forestry. We at 4betterdays.com actively support this. We recently put our promise into action and planted trees in cooperation with the Austrian Federal Forests. Our customers and fans contributed with a like and share on social media channels by determining the number of seedlings. So it was said to our team: "Get out of the office and get to planting trees".
The wood
Popular belief says that the maple provides effective protection against witches. Especially in Northern Germany, doors and rooms were sometimes decorated with maple, or maple wood pegs were hammered into doors and thresholds. If maple leaves are picked on June 24 and then dried, they are considered to have healing powers for all wounds if they have been soaked in boiling water beforehand.
The use of the wood is similar to that of mountain pine. Since the trunks and branches do not grow very thick, they can be used as turning and carving wood, as well as for simple furniture, as planed wood in interior and exterior construction, and in window construction. However, when freshly cut, the sapwood is very susceptible to blue stain fungi. Mountain pine oil for cosmetic products is obtained from fresh needles, branch tips, and branches. In the distillery, the oil is obtained by steam distillation. As finished mountain pine oil, it can be bottled pure and offered for sale. It is used for external and internal application for colds of the upper and lower respiratory tract. In medical baths, it is used to support the treatment of rheumatic diseases in the non-acute stage.
Birch species are deciduous, summergreen trees or shrubs. They belong to the very fast-growing and tall-growing woody plants and can reach growth heights of up to 7 meters after just 6 years, and up to 30 meters when fully grown. The birch can reach an age of up to 160 years.
The wood of the bird cherry or the sweet cherry experienced enormous popularity during the Biedermeier period. Back then, when people withdrew into their own four walls due to political oppression in many European countries, they wanted at least one thing: to surround themselves with beautiful things. And cherry wood was an important part of the inward-looking bourgeois coziness.
Pear wood is a sought-after wood in furniture making due to its color, density, and good polishability. It is hard, heavy, tough, and not very elastic, with a medium density of 0.74 g/cm³. Pear wood dries slowly and without major cracking, and it is very dimensionally stable when dry. When steamed, the natural color of the wood changes from a very light silver-gray to light yellow into a warm, reddish hue. In old age, it gets a very beautiful reddish-brown, amber-like coloring. Despite its hardness, pear wood is very suitable for carving the finest details, because due to the stone cells, it can be worked in various directions without splintering. Black-stained pear wood was used in fine carpentry as a substitute for the rarer and more expensive ebony, because it takes stain very well. In this colored form, it was also often referred to as "German ebony".
The larch has, similar to the pine and the Douglas fir, a pronounced difference between the heartwood area and the sapwood. The latter is light yellow to reddish, while the heartwood is significantly darker, glowing red to reddish-brown. Due to its resistance to weather and chemicals, larch wood is also used for exterior and special applications in earth, bridge, and water construction, as well as for liquid storage containers (vats, barrels), cooling towers, and silos. A historical use was the main beams of mill sails, for which the wood is particularly suitable due to its toughness. In addition, there are ramming piles, masts, railway sleepers, as well as uses in railway, ship, and boat building, wooden playground equipment, flooring (decking, wood paving), fences, palisades, and other applications where wood is intended to be used without impregnation.
To the Greeks and Romans, the beech was a sacred tree. The Celts associated the beech with a wish tree. Y-shaped beech branches (→ letters) were tied to beeches with wishes attached. Today, it is less mystical properties that are associated with the beech. The wood – especially the European beech – is a popular furniture and veneer wood.
Lime wood is sold both as round and sawn wood, but is only available in small quantities. The main use is for sculpture, carving, and woodturning. There are no significant differences between the wood of the two lime species native to Central Europe. However, the winter lime is said to have slightly heavier, denser, and harder wood. Lime wood is soft and, with a raw density of 530 kg/m3 at 12 to 15% wood moisture, is a medium-heavy native deciduous wood.
The wood of the sweet chestnut is ring-porous and medium-heavy. It has a raw density (at 15 percent moisture) of 0.63 grams per cubic centimeter. The sapwood is narrow and whitish-yellow. It is clearly demarcated from the brown heartwood. The annual rings are clearly visible. Wood rays are numerous, evenly structured, one- or two-rowed, and are 15 to 30 cell rows high. The wood has a high tannin content of up to 13 percent of the dry weight.
The wood of the walnut tree is a sought-after raw material in furniture and veneer production. But it is also gladly used for turned goods, musical instruments, and – in the form of figured veneer – for expensive instrument panels. Walnut chests and trunks protect the contents from moths thanks to their tannin-rich wood.
Strong as an oak. This sentence is characteristic of a tree that can live up to 2,000 years. It is more likely that the tree anchored deep in the ground will snap than that it will be uprooted.
The robinia was introduced to Europe in the early 17th century by Jean Robin from Virginia to Paris, where two specimens planted by Robin in the Jardin des Plantes and in front of the north facade of the Church of St. Julien-le-Pauvre near Notre-Dame are considered the oldest trees in the city. Due to their attractive flower clusters and their pinnate leaves, the common robinia was first planted as an exotic ornamental plant in parks. In 1640 it reached England, and the first evidence of cultivation in Germany dates back to 1670, where it was planted in the Berlin Lustgarten. In 1726 it was known in Italy.
Alder wood is soft and has an even, fine structure. It has a raw density of 550 kg/m3 at a wood moisture of 12 to 15% and thus belongs to the medium-heavy native woods. The wood is not very firm and also not very elastic, and in these properties it is comparable to lime wood.
As fir wood, the wood of the firs (genus Abies) is designated, which, like spruce, pine, or larch wood, belongs to the coniferous woods. In Europe and large parts of Northern Asia, this designation almost exclusively refers to the wood of the silver fir (Abies alba), less frequently to the coastal fir (Abies grandis) originating from North America.
The wood of the elm is called "Rüster". So elm only refers to the standing tree, not the cut wood. The elm is a heartwood-growing tree. The ring-porous wood of the mountain elm has three zones that follow the annual rings: a yellowish-white sapwood, a similarly light heartwood, and a pale brown to reddish heartwood.
The mountain spruce is considered a versatile wood and is very common in native forests. It also has low site requirements and grows in the mountains as well. Mountain spruce wood is of very high quality and highly versatile!
This conifer only grows at high altitudes and under the most difficult conditions, freely exposed to the harsh forces of nature. These adverse living conditions promote the vitality of the Swiss stone pine. And it stores exactly this power in its wood - in the form of essential oils. With careful processing, Swiss stone pine wood passes its wonderful, incomparably aromatic scent on to us.
The wood of the hornbeam is white to grayish-white, which gave it the name white beech in contrast to the reddish wood of the red beech. There are no color differences between sapwood and heartwood. The wood is evenly structured, annual rings are difficult to see. The wood of the hornbeam is very hard and heavy, it is harder than that of the beech and the oak (Brinell hardness 36 N/mm²).
The wood of the sweet cherry (also known as Swiss pear) is one of the hardest European woods and therefore very valuable. In processing, it is tough and at the same time elastic, as well as fine-grained and dense. In its fresh state, the appearance is light with a velvety surface and is gladly referred to as silk wood, the wood darkens reddish - a darker red-yellow to reddish-brown hue - afterwards. In furniture making, it is primarily used for exclusive furniture with high demands on quality and design. Due to its high hardness, it is also ideal as parquet flooring. Products made from sweet cherry wood.
The ash belongs to the mystical trees. In Nordic mythology, it stands for the world tree. For the Greeks, the ashes were the fire-givers of men after Zeus had taken the fire from them. Prometheus brought it back to them, ignited on a piece of ash wood.
