If you saw the last post on the blog, I showed you some beautiful museum quality furniture produced by Frank Pollaro Frank recently sent me some photos showing me the path that the ancient logs of Macassar ebony take to reach his workshop in New Jersey. These will help you to understand how truly rare the wood is that passes Mr. Pollaro’s inspection for his furniture. And you will see why it takes so long and is so costly to make very custom furniture.

Here are portions of his notes and some of the photos he sent to me:

“Pollaro Custom Furniture has become a major consumer of Macassar ebony wood in both veneer and solid lumber forms. This wood species has a dramatic appearance, with a long straight grain pattern in strongly contrasting light/dark colors. During the Art Deco period, Macassar ebony was the favored wood species for furniture production by master craftsmen such as Ruhlmann. It continues to be revered by today’s furniture designers.”

“True Macassar ebony, Diospyros celebica, is in scarce supply. Only 4% of the ebony logs that wood dealers offer to me are genuine Macassar ebony. And, most of those that are genuine are small in width, reflecting the scarcity of mature trees. The remaining 96% of the ebony we see is a lower grade cousin of Diospyros celebica, with blurred grain pattern, pale color, and large pore structure that produces a coarse finish and a lifeless piece of furniture.”

“We recently had a chance encounter with a wood dealer who travels the world looking for exotic wood species. The dealer described a cache of true Macassar ebony that he discovered in the jungles of Indonesia about ten years ago. An “Indiana Jones” type, he seemed prone to exaggeration, so we decided to proceed with caution. As “Indiana” told the tale, the ebony was discovered on Sulawesi, a remote island that lies between Borneo and New Guinea. The ebony was legally harvested by local lumbermen under “Indiana’s” direction and transported out of the jungle using ox drawn sleds. The ebony was then shipped to the US by boat and slowly dried under controlled conditions for 10 years.”

“We visited “Indiana’s” US warehouse where this ebony was stored. His inventory consisted of 127 Diospyros celebica cants-squared logs derived from 127 individual trees. The outward appearance of these cants was deceiving, since their rough exterior surface had oxidized to an unremarkable dark brown color during their ten years in storage. However, once sliced into lumber, the dramatic character of genuine Macassar ebony was revealed. Not only were the cants perfect in grain quality and color, but they were extremely large in width, resulting in boards up to 14 inches wide and 15 feet long. No single cant was less than 6 inches in width or 12 feet in length. I have not seen material of this quality in my 20 years in the furniture business. As a result, I purchased the dealer’s entire inventory of Macassar ebony.”

“The ebony cants were then delivered to the LaSalle Sawmill in Oregon to be converted into lumber. I personally supervised the milling program, spending a week in Oregon’s high desert to ensure that my rigid quality specifications were satisfied. The ebony lumber we processed was of such tight grain structure that the sawmill consumed 63 saw blades just to convert the 127 cants into lumber. More importantly, as each cant was cut, the unique character of each log was revealed. I have never seen ebony of such dramatic color and grain pattern in my life.”

“After milling, each ebony board was washed and re-stacked in the exact sequence it existed in the tree. The boards derived from each cant were stickered and banded together, preserving the original sequence. This gives me the ability to perfectly book-match boards for each piece of ebony furniture we build.”

The result of this adventure is that Pollaro now possesses the largest collection of genuine Macassar ebony lumber in the world. Fortunately, each stage of the process of creating this unique inventory was captured photographically, so you and I can understand this complex and unusual undertaking.

In the hands of Pollaro’s master craftsmen, this extraordinary material can be transformed into museum quality furniture. You can refer to Pollaro’s website to review some of his creations in Macassar ebony.

Now you know how this very rare wood is discovered, handled and cut. It is a painstaking process that is absolutely required to achieve the refinement of amazing furniture that looks like this: