Why every table at Forma starts with two years of drying boards in a barn outside Porto.
Eight hundred boards lean against each other in a barn outside Porto. They have been there since 2024. Some of them will become a dining table next spring.
Air dried oak moves less than kiln dried oak. It is also slower, and slow is expensive. Our workshop partners agreed to hold a stock for us, which means we can promise something unusual: when you order a table, the wood has already been waiting for you.
We choose boards in pairs. Grain is read from the top, from the edge and from the end, and then matched so the table looks like one piece of timber. The two butterfly keys that hold the boards together are cut from the same tree.
None of this shows in a photograph. It shows in ten years, when the table has not cupped and the colour has deepened evenly.