Choose French oak if you want a calm, even grain, a harder surface and the option of a natural or walnut colour. Choose English elm if you want wild grain, dramatic live edges and a timber that has become genuinely scarce. Both make excellent dining tables, and how well the slabs have been dried matters more than which species you pick.

French oak and English elm at a glance

How they look

French oak is the quieter of the two. Its heartwood is a light to medium brown, often with a slight olive tone, and the grain runs fairly straight. The live edges on French oak slabs tend to be straight and uniform, which suits a room where you want the table to feel calm rather than wild.

We make each French oak top from a single tree, so the grain pattern and colour match across the whole surface. You can have it in its natural colour or stained to a walnut colour if you want something darker without changing species.

English elm is the more theatrical choice. The heartwood is a reddish brown, the paler sapwood usually shows as a clear band along the edges, and the interlocked grain produces swirling figure. English elm slabs are full of knots and features along the live edges, which can range from relatively straight to extremely wild. We can adjust the edge to suit you, from a gentle wave to something much more dramatic.

How they wear

On the Janka hardness test, which measures how well a wood resists denting, European oak scores about 1,120 lbf and English elm about 810 lbf. That makes oak nearly 40% harder, so if your table will take daily knocks from children, keys and dropped cutlery, oak has a real advantage.

Elm is still a strong hardwood. The Woodland Trust describes it as strong and durable, and lists its traditional uses as boats, furniture, wheel hubs, wooden water pipes, floorboards and coffins. Whichever you choose, we finish the top in either Rubio Monocoat Pure for a hard-wearing matt surface or multiple coats of Osmo high-gloss for a mirror-like shine.

Splitting, warping and stability

This is where the two woods differ in ways people don’t expect. Elm’s interlocked grain makes it very resistant to splitting. On the other hand, elm has a reputation for moving with changes in humidity, and the Wood Database describes its dimensional stability as poor.

Oak behaves the other way round while it dries. Timber drying guidance puts oak among the species most prone to surface checking, and it dries very slowly. Once dry, though, TRADA (the Timber Research and Development Association) puts European oak and European elm in the same “medium” movement class.

The practical answer is the same for both: the slabs must be properly dried before they are made into a table. Ours are kiln-dried to a moisture content of 8% or below. Our guide on why solid wood tables split and warp explains why that number matters.

Why English elm is so rare

Dutch elm disease is caused by two related fungi that elm bark beetles carry from tree to tree. According to Forest Research, within ten years of the epidemic that began in the 1960s about 20 million of the UK’s estimated 30 million-plus mature elms were dead, and by the 1990s the figure was probably well over 25 million.

English elm survives mainly as younger trees in hedgerows, which regrow from old root systems but become vulnerable to the beetles once they reach a certain size. The result is that wide slabs from big, mature English elms are hard to find. Because of that rarity, we buy and hold stock of large English elm slabs whenever we can.

How wide can each table be?

We use the fewest slabs possible and book-match them from the same log, so the grain mirrors itself across the centre of the table.

• English elm slabs usually come up to about 65cm wide, so two slabs make a table up to 1.3m wide. For a wider table, up to 1.5m, we use three.
• For French oak we source ultra-wide slabs, allowing tables up to 1.5m wide from just two book-matched slabs.
• If you want no join at all, we can make a table between 1m and 1.5m wide from a single slab of burr oak, often up to 60mm thick.

Not sure what width you need? Our dining table size guide covers seating, width and room space.

Which should you choose?

Go for French oak if:

• you want the colour and grain to be consistent from one end of the table to the other
• you would like a darker, walnut-coloured table
• the table will see heavy daily use and you want the harder surface
• you prefer a straighter, calmer live edge, or a chamfered edge all round

Go for English elm if:

• you want bold figure, knots and sapwood to be the main feature
• you like a warmer, reddish-brown tone
• you want dramatic live edges
• the rarity and history of the timber matter to you

Budgets for our bespoke tables run from roughly £2,000 to £10,000+, depending mainly on the rarity of the wood and the size of the table. The best way to decide is to look at finished tables in our French oak gallery and English elm gallery. We can also source almost any other species, including American black walnut and pippy oak.

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