Solid hardwood in a Gulf climate
A solid piece is never quite still. It takes moisture from the air and gives it back, and in the Gulf the air it meets indoors is very different from the air outside the door. Understood, that movement is ordinary and harmless. Ignored, it is the one thing that damages a carved piece.
What the air does
Wood does not stop exchanging moisture with the air around it when the tree is cut. It keeps doing so for as long as it exists, settling towards a balance with whatever room it stands in. Raise the humidity and the wood takes moisture up and swells slightly. Lower it and the wood gives moisture back and shrinks slightly.
In the Gulf this matters more than in most places, because a piece lives between two climates that have almost nothing in common. Outside: heat, and on the coast a great deal of humidity. Inside: air conditioning, which cools and, in doing so, dries. A piece is not troubled by either one on its own. What asks something of it is the move from one to the other, and how fast that move happens.
Where movement shows, and where it does not
Movement is not evenly distributed. A board changes very little along the grain and noticeably across it. A wide surface will therefore move across its width while its length stays as it was. This is why a tabletop can be fitted one month and feel a fraction different the next, and why the same piece will be back where it started when the season turns.
A piece cut from a single trunk behaves differently from one built up out of parts. There are no glue lines to open and no joints to work loose, because there are none. The whole piece moves together, as the tree did. In exchange it asks to be treated as one body: not braced against a wall so hard it cannot breathe, not screwed down to a surface that moves on a different schedule.
Placement
| Where | What happens | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Under or beside an air-conditioning outlet | A narrow stream of cold, dry air dries one face faster than the rest | Move the piece out of the direct stream; a metre is usually enough |
| In direct sun, including through glass | Surface heat and fading, unevenly across the piece | Keep out of the sun’s path, or filter it |
| Against an outside wall or window in a humid month | One side meets damp air, the other conditioned air | Leave a hand’s width of clearance so air passes behind |
| On a floor that is washed often | Moisture taken up through the feet | Felt or hardwood pads under the feet |
| In a room left unconditioned for weeks, then cooled hard | A fast swing instead of a slow one | Let the room come back to temperature before the piece does — hours, not minutes |
Care through the year
Dust with a dry, soft cloth, along the carving rather than across it. Water is not a cleaner for these surfaces; a damp cloth should be wrung out until it is barely damp, and the surface dried straight after. Household sprays, silicone polishes and anything containing alcohol or ammonia do not belong on a hand-finished surface.
Twice a year is enough for a feed, and in a dry conditioned room perhaps three times. What to use depends on how a particular piece was finished, so ask us for that piece rather than taking a general rule off a shelf.
If a hairline opens along the grain in a very dry month, it is almost always the wood doing what wood does, and it closes again. Tell us when you see it and we will say whether it is ordinary or not. What is not ordinary is a crack that runs across the grain, or one that keeps widening through a change of season.
Questions we are asked
Does a solid piece crack in Dubai?
Not from the heat. Pieces are damaged by fast changes, not by a hot climate — most often by sitting in the path of an air-conditioning outlet, or by a room being left closed and unconditioned for weeks and then cooled hard. Placed sensibly, a solid piece lives in the Gulf as well as anywhere.
Is one wood steadier than another?
Density helps. The denser the wood, the less it moves for a given change in the air, which is one reason very dense tropical hardwoods have been used for carved work for centuries. It makes a difference of degree, not of kind: every wood moves.
Is a piece carved from one trunk more fragile than one assembled from parts?
It is the other way round for the failures that matter. There are no glue lines to fail and no joints to loosen. What it asks instead is room to move as a single body.
What humidity should a room be kept at?
Rather than a number, aim for steadiness. A room held at a comfortable, fairly constant level all year is kinder to a piece than one that is swung between extremes, whatever the figure on the dial.