Someone asks us almost every week: "What wood is it?" It's one of those questions people feel they should know the answer to but often don't, because the toy industry doesn't generally tell you. The box says "wood" or "solid wood" or, if the brand is feeling forthcoming, "beech" — but rarely explains why.

This is how we think about it in our workshop. Not a comprehensive guide to timber species, just the logic we actually apply when a piece of timber arrives and we're deciding whether it's going to become a stacking set or end up as offcuts.

Grain density and what happens when things get dropped

The most common failure mode in a children's toy isn't a structural joint giving way — it's the surface splitting or splintering when the piece hits a hard floor at speed. Children throw things. They drop things from height. A material that would be perfectly acceptable for a decorative shelf bracket becomes a hazard in this context.

Beech has a very tight, close grain. The fibres are densely packed and aligned in a way that means the wood doesn't want to separate along a predictable line. If you drop a beech block on a tiled floor from a metre up, it might dent. It won't splinter into shards. That's not a minor distinction when the thing is going into a two-year-old's room.

Ash has longer fibres with slightly more spring to them. This makes it better in situations where a piece needs to absorb impact along its length — a pull-along toy's axle, for instance, that flexes slightly when dragged across an uneven surface rather than cracking.

Weight in small hands

There's an optimal weight range for toys that will be handled by children under four. Too light and they feel insubstantial — children know the difference, even if they can't articulate it. Too heavy and a piece becomes difficult to manipulate, which works against the developmental purpose of the toy.

Beech is dense enough to feel solid without being heavy. A single stacking piece in our standard size — roughly 60mm cube — weighs about 110g in beech. The same piece in maple comes out around 125g. The difference is perceptible but not significant at this size. Where it matters is in larger pieces: a pull-along animal in ash runs 15–20% lighter than the same form in beech, which makes a noticeable difference when a small child is dragging it across a room.

How the wood takes a finish

Oil and wax finishes — which are what we use on pieces for children under eight — penetrate the wood grain rather than sitting on top of it. They feed the cellulose fibres, which has the effect of making the surface more resistant to moisture and incidental staining. They also make the material feel less like a manufactured object and more like something found in nature, which sounds like marketing but is actually a tactile reality.

Beech takes linseed oil very evenly, which is why it's our default for things that need to look consistent — alphabet sets, stacking pieces, puzzles where visual uniformity matters. Ash has a slightly more open grain that takes oil differently across the surface, creating subtle tonal variation. We think this looks interesting; it's a feature of the material, not a defect.

Maple, when we use it, is for pieces that will receive water-based pigments. Its cellular structure is unusually tight and even, which means colour sits on the surface with very little bleeding or variation. If you want a consistent red, maple is the more reliable canvas.

Where it comes from

All of our timber is FSC-certified. This matters to us not primarily for the marketing value of the certification, but because the certification requires chain-of-custody documentation that tells us where the tree was felled and when. Beech and ash come from forestry operations in Bavaria, Lower Saxony, and Schleswig-Holstein. Maple is imported through a certified Nordic timber merchant in Hamburg who handles Canadian and American supply.

We buy in small quantities — typically 20–40kg at a time, enough for six to eight weeks of work. Buying small means we can inspect each delivery and reject boards that have defects we don't want to work around. Larger workshops would have the opposite incentive.

We're not going to claim we know the exact forest our timber came from or the name of the forester. The certification gives us reasonable confidence that the supply chain has been audited. That's honest and we won't claim more.