How We Source Each Piece Directly From Indonesia

Sourcing begins on the ground, and it begins slowly. We spent fifteen years living between Java and Bali before a single object crossed the Pacific to Escazú. That time was not incidental. It is the difference between buying furniture and reading it.

A trip runs on its own clock. It starts in Surabaya, the old port city on Java's north coast, where colonial-era houses are still being emptied and their contents move quietly through a handful of dealers who have known each other for two generations. From there we go inland to Jepara, the woodworking town where much of Java's teak has been cut, joined, and carved since the nineteenth century. Then south and east to Bali — Ubud for the smaller ateliers, the villages beyond it for the large suar slabs. None of this is done in a week. The good pieces are not on the road. They are in the back of a workshop, behind the ones meant to sell fast.

What the wood tells you

Teak is the wood most people ask about, and it is the one most often misrepresented. Old Javanese teak — jati — was slow-grown, dense, and dark with oil that rises to the surface for decades after the tree is felled. You can read its age in the grain: tight, close lines, with a color that deepens rather than fades. New plantation teak grows fast and wide, the grain looser and paler, and no finish makes it behave like the old stock. When a table is sold as antique teak, the wood itself either confirms the claim or ends it. We turn a piece over and look at the underside, where nothing has been sanded to please a buyer.

Suar is a different material entirely, and it belongs to a different part of the collection. It is the rain tree — broad, fast, grown for shade across the archipelago — and it is cut into single wide slabs with the live edge and the pale sapwood left intact. Suar is not old the way jati is old. Its appeal is the width of the tree and the movement of the figure, and an honest dealer never dresses a suar slab as an antique. The two woods answer different questions, and confusing them is the most common error we see.

Reclaimed hardwood is a third category, and the one where language gets loosest. Reclaimed means the wood had a first life — as a house post, a boat timber, a floor, a beam from a demolished colonial building. That first life leaves marks: old mortises with nothing in them, iron stains, checks that opened a century ago and stopped. Those marks are the provenance. A reclaimed piece that has been sanded smooth and stained even has usually had its history removed along with the evidence.

What the joinery tells you

Where the wood ends, the joinery begins. Dutch colonial cabinetry from the 1930s was built by Javanese hands working to European proportions, and the construction shows it. Look for hand-cut dovetails on the drawers, slightly uneven, each one fitted to its neighbor rather than machined identical. Look for pegged mortise-and-tenon joints instead of screws or glue, and for door frames that float within their panels to let the wood move with the humidity. These are not decorative choices. They are how a case piece survives a hundred wet seasons without splitting.

Carving is read the same way. Jepara work at its best is cut into the solid, not applied to the surface — you can feel the depth with a fingertip and see the tool marks where the blade turned. Applied carving, glued on afterward, sits proud and separates over time. The hand that cut a piece leaves a signature in how it handles a corner, and after enough years you begin to recognize the workshops without being told.

None of this can be verified from a photograph, which is why we still go, still turn every piece over, still buy in person. The knowledge is not a document that travels with the object. It lives in the looking, and the looking cannot be hurried.

The collection sits in the showroom-home in Escazú, and the woods discussed here are best understood in the hand. Visits are by appointment.