When the Utility furniture scheme was abolished in 1952 and as we emerged from post war austerity, furniture makers looked around for new cabinet making woods to tempt a new generation of home owners with.

An early entrant was sapele, an African hardwood closely resembling mahogany. A new trend in interior design, contemporary, proved very popular with the post war generation, anxious to move on from the heavy and fussy oak and walnut bedroom and dining room suites of their parents. Much contemporary furniture began to be finished with sapele veneer, often complemented with black detail on the legs of dressing tables and living room furniture and sometimes black glass for shelves.

Very little furniture of the time was made from solid wood, chipboard was yet to arrive, so the constructural substrates were principally blockboard and plywood. Precious European hardwoods and expensively imported African timbers were valued for their beauty but were  far too valuable to be used for construction; so the ancient cabinet making craft if veneering became predominant.

‘Veneer is obtained either by “peeling” the trunk of a tree or by slicing large rectangular blocks of wood known as flitches. The appearance of the grainfigure in wood comes from slicing through the growth rings of a tree and depends upon the angle at which the wood is sliced. There are three main types of veneer-making equipment used commercially: and

• A rotary lathe in which the wood is turned against a very sharp blade and peeled off in one continuous or semi-continuous roll. Rotary-cut veneer is mainly used for plywood, as the appearance is not desirable because the veneer is cut concentric to the growth rings.
• A slicing machine in which the flitch or piece of log is raised and lowered against the blade and slices of the log are made. This yields veneer which looks like sawn pieces of wood, cut across the growth rings.
• A half-round lathe in which the log or piece of log can be turned and moved in such a way to expose the most interesting parts of the grain.

Each slicing processes gives a very distinctive type of grain, depending upon the tree species. In any of the veneer slicing methods, when the veneer is sliced, a distortion of the grain occurs. As it hits the wood, the knife blade creates a “loose” side where the cells have been opened up by the blade, and a “tight” side.

Traditionally, veneers were also sawn, but this is more wasteful of wood. Veneering is an ancient art, dating back to the ancient Egyptians who used veneers on their furniture and sarcophagi.’ (Wikipedia)

Veneering overcomes the tendency of solid hardwoods to expand, contract and distort, particularly in centrally heated environments, it reduces costs as decorative hardwoods become ever more expensive and environmentaly helpful in conserving  stocks of diminishing resources.

Meanwhile the Scandinavians were developing their own ideas in modern furniture design and teak was about to take the furniture market by storm.