Cherry, Up Close: The Wood We Chose for the Catch-All Tray

Hold a piece of cherry in good light and run your thumb across it. It is smooth in a way that does not feel sealed or slick. It feels like wood that wants to be touched. That is most of why we chose it for the Catch All Tray, a piece that lives within reach and gets handled every single day.

There is more to it than feel, though. Cherry has a set of qualities that make it right for a small everyday object, and a few that make it special.

A Warm, Fine Grain

Cherry is a fine-grained hardwood. The grain runs close and even, without the bold open pores you find in oak or the dramatic figure of some other woods. That tight grain is what gives cherry its smooth hand and its quiet, warm look.

For a small tray, that restraint matters. A piece this size does not need a loud grain competing for attention on a dresser or by the door. Cherry sits calm. It reads as warm wood first and a pattern second. The grain is there when you look for it, soft and flowing, but it never shouts.

Grain is not only a question of looks. It changes how a piece takes a finish and how it wears. We get into that across the catalog in how wood grain affects the look of a finished piece, and cherry is one of the most forgiving woods to work because of that even grain.

How Cherry Ages

Here is the part that makes cherry worth talking about. It changes color over time. A fresh-cut piece of cherry is pale, almost pinkish in places. Left to live in a room with normal light, it deepens. It pulls toward a richer red-brown, and it keeps going for a long while.

This is not damage or fading. It is the wood doing what cherry does. The tray you set down by your door this month will be a noticeably warmer, deeper tone a year from now. It records its own time in your home.

We love this in an everyday object. Most things wear out. Cherry wears in. A piece that improves with age becomes harder to part with, and it ties itself to the room it has lived in. If you want the home-side version of that thought, we wrote it up in the catch-all tray.

The Finish We Put On It

We finish each tray with tung oil, worked in by hand. Tung oil sits in the wood rather than forming a hard film on top of it, which keeps the cherry feeling like cherry. The grain stays close to the surface, and the warmth comes through.

We buff between coats rather than sanding them. That keeps the surface honest and lets each coat bond to the one beneath it without stripping away the depth we are building. The full reasoning is in what tung oil does to wood. A tung oil finish also ages gracefully alongside the wood, which suits a piece that is meant to darken over the years.

Where the Cherry Comes From

We do not buy cherry by the truckload. We choose boards for grain and tone, and we mill them in the shop. The trays come out of that same wood we work for the larger pieces.

Milling cherry leaves chips and offcuts. Plenty of shops bag those up and throw them out. We do not. Cherry chips have their own uses, and nothing leaves our shop as waste if we can find a purpose for it. We laid out that whole approach in nothing leaves the shop as waste. The short version is that the same care that goes into picking a board goes into not wasting the rest of it.

Choosing the right wood for a piece is most of the work before the work starts. Cherry is harder to shortcut than it looks, and so is sourcing it well, which we cover in wood sourcing.

Cherry is a wood that rewards patience. It starts warm and grows warmer. For a tray you will touch every day, that felt like exactly the right choice.

You can see the Catch All Tray here, or browse the full range of our woodwork.