Live-Edge Furniture: A (Big) Piece Of London

When a tree falls in a forest, it’s often turned into firewood. That’s what happens in London at least, and this city initiative often means a lot of beautiful, majestic trees are unceremoniously burned and lost to time!

 

Such beautiful wood should get a new life and audience, and we here at Rustix love turning centuries-old trees into live-edge furniture. It turns the natural beauty and uniqueness of the trees into art, gives them a new life, and creates pieces that put the tree’s longevity to good use.

 

What’s The Deal With Our Live-Edge Furniture?

 

When Rustix makes furniture, everything comes from London. This includes locally sourced metals for our bases, but more importantly, we use locally sourced wood. Our live-edge furniture used to come from mills, but now we have the chance to use the City of London for our materials and make furniture that’s unique, intimate, and reflective of the place we call home.

 

Recently, our story was told in the London Free Press, and it goes a little like this: the city fells around 1,200 trees each year for sound reasons, like preventing the spread of diseases, making way for power lines, etc. Often times this wood would be sent off to rural areas and used as firewood, but we were lucky enough to get our hands on the main trunks of trees and use them for furniture.

 

We take the logs too big to fit through a wood chipper, logs that would normally be honed into smaller pieces, and use them for our surfaces. They’re cut into large slabs, dried for about eight weeks in a kiln, and then laminated and finished with natural oils and beeswax.  

 

Being able to keep and incorporate the special qualities of trees is why we make live-edge furniture. But now that we use local trees, which come from places we actually know, our furniture is much more special to us.

 

Loving (And Using) Our Roots

 

We love London, and being able to feature a little bit of the Forest City in every piece of furniture we make gives it an extra special charm. We’re so lucky to be surrounded by so much beauty in this city, and doing our part to hold on to this beauty is just a bonus of our business.

 

There are so many more positives, too! Locally sourced materials are also great for the environment. Using materials from trees that were already going to be cut down and removed makes it even more so. Recycling materials means less waste and making furniture both the buyers and we, the makers, can feel good about.

 

We believe that London and the surrounding area contains a lot of hidden beauty, and if our live-edge tables, chairs, and other furniture can prove this to customers, then we’ve done our job!