Top 5 solid wood sit stand desks for 2021
As standing desks increase in popularity for both office and home working, so does the demand for a wider choice of desktop materials. Here at Flomotion we specialise in standing desks with premium solid wood desktops, offering our customers the best selection of unique, long lasting, height adjustable furniture in the UK. Our desktops are handmade from individual raw planks, crafted to give a gorgeously smooth surface and finished with matt clear lacquer for a liquid proof, hardwearing surface.
You will typically see half a-dozen or more lines separating the grain/planks that make up the desktop. As a general rule cheaper tops will be made using a larger number of narrower planks. An extreme example of this being kitchen worktops made with small individual pieces of wood. And conversely, the fewer the number of planks, the more expensive the top. We also make desktops using only four individual planks, so get in touch if you’d like a quote.
Choose from five solid woods – oak, walnut, ash, cherry and reclaimed pine, each with its own distinctive features and rich colours. The grain patterns, knots and unique individual features of natural wood are just some of the reasons customers prefer solid wood, along with its durability and the fact that the character of wood improves with age.
WFH office spaces and biophilic design
You can’t beat the natural aesthetics of wooden furniture. There’s a reason that wood is so popular and such a timeless material — it looks beautiful, is robust and hardwearing, feels good and performs fantastically in a range of roles. You can also pretty much guarantee that it’ll never go out of style.
Which Wood?
Many varieties of solid wood are used in the production of furniture, each with its own characteristics and appearance, and they are usually one of two types: softwood or hardwood. Hardwood comes from deciduous trees such as birch, walnut, cherry, oak and ash. Softwood comes from coniferous trees, such as pine and larch. A ‘hardwood’ is not necessarily harder or denser than a ‘softwood’ though, so don’t be fooled by their names!
Softwoods are often light in colour, and hardwoods tend to be darker. Hardwoods have pores for transporting water throughout the tree, and these pores are what makes the difference in the appearance of the wood grain on a desktop. The interesting grain of a hardwood such as ash is more obvious than the grain of a softwood such as pine because the pores are more visible.
An Investment
Throughout history, natural wood has played an important role in interiors. Wooden furniture has an almost magical attraction, and, depending on the wood used, the rich colours, textures and tones can create a warm, cosy atmosphere and fit effortlessly into any interior design space. The wonderful thing about wood is that it works equally well with modern or traditional interiors. Our desktops are designed to give years of use and pleasure, and in the process they will age beautifully over time.
Bespoke sizes and unrivalled flexibility
With the huge increase in people now working from home and setting up ‘home offices’, it makes real sense to invest in well-designed office furniture that will last for decades and also look and feel ‘at home’ too. The telescopic feature of the Skyflo frame offers the flexibility of bespoke desk sizes that work with the space you have available from less than a metre wide up to 2.4 metres.
Our reclaimed scaffold desktops have sustainability built in, being recycled and repurposed. After serving their time on building sites, these pine planks are given another lease of life and transformed into solid, practical, ‘eco-friendly’ desktops. Their surfaces are rich in detail and character from a previous life, and some even have the original lettering branded on the edges. Each piece is unique and built to last a lifetime, ageing into a treasured piece of home-office furniture.
Hand-crafted, our oak desktops are durable, hardwearing and beautiful. The wood is sourced from Europe, and is a gorgeous, golden-to-medium brown, which literally glows in certain lighting conditions. Also, because of its excellent finishing properties, oak can be stained if you’re working with a particular colour palette. Relied on for centuries as a traditional building material, oak is a strong, hard and heavy wood, due to its dense, close grain.
As a natural, indigenous wood, oak ties in perfectly with the biophilic interior design approach. It gives a warm, familiar and tactile surface, solid and reassuring to the touch, reconnecting us with the natural world on a deep, personal level. With its timeless design aesthetics, and as the tone mellows with age, an oak desktop will blend with the home-office setting as a quality piece of office furniture designed to last for decades.
Alongside cherry wood, walnut is the most expensive wood that we offer and is also one of our most popular – for good reason. As a statement piece of office furniture, the grain, patterns and rich colours give walnut a look and feel that exudes quality, with a classic style that’s timeless. This hardwood’s outstanding decorative finish is combined with superb performance properties. It blends the elegance and finish that an office desk requires with the durability to withstand the rigours of daily use over long periods of time.
Walnut works equally well with any of the three Skyflo frame colour choices – white, grey or black. If you want to match the frame to other items of office furniture, such as a chair fabric, base or filing cabinet, this also gives you some other interior design options.
Like all richly coloured woods, a walnut desktop is a surface that needs to be admired. Walnut wood often lightens over time, mainly due to strong daylight entering through windows. For this reason, we advise that a walnut desk is not hidden under piles of paperwork, but is kept clear to use and enjoy, and that objects on the surface are moved around on a regular basis.
To make a statement, why not consider woods such as the American black cherry, from the dense forests of northeast USA.
Cherry with its fine texture and cream pink to reddish-brown sapwood is a hardwood that looks at home in many office set-ups. It’s also a woodworker’s dream, because it’s so easy to work with and produces a high-quality surface.
Over time many types of wood will naturally darken. This is especially true of cherry wood. Starting out as a light pink/golden colour, it becomes darker quite quickly when exposed to light, turning into a rich, brown-red colour. You can speed up this process or slow it down, depending on your preferences, by giving it more or less exposure to sunlight.
Strong, durable, shock-resistant and with a straight, regular grain pattern, ash is one of the most attractive woods for furniture and flooring alike. This hardwood is really resilient yet lightweight, and is regularly used as a substitute for oak, due to its hardness and density.
As a sit-stand desktop, especially for those needing a hard-wearing surface for creative jobs, ash gives you the perfect combination of strength, durability and aesthetics. White to pale brown in colour, this surface contrasts beautifully with a black SKYLO frame, but also works equally well with white or grey, if you want to create a lighter feel.
In Norse mythology, the ash was known as ‘The Tree of Life’ and was believed to have mystical properties, so why not bring a little bit of magic into your workspace?
Solid wood and biophilic design
As part of a ‘biophilic’ design approach, it’s key to consider natural materials for office furniture. Biophilic interior design has an enormous impact on health, wellbeing, creativity and productivity. So, by using wood for our desks, we’re incorporating a durable, sustainable material into the working environment, made from something natural, beautiful and living.
During this past year, wood has become one of the top trends in interior design, and as a sustainable and natural material, that’s not surprising. In times of stress and uncertainty, we unconsciously gravitate towards wanting to make our home (which has for an increasing number of people become our workspace too) and space where we work feel safe and calm.
Connecting to nature through tangible natural textures helps us to create an oasis, a sanctuary to provide comfort and a sense of security, where we can look after our wellbeing, keep energised, stay focused and be productive. The rich, warm colours associated with wood also connect us with nature and feed into the tactile sensations that we’ve all been craving during recent restrictions.
As well as the wood, what goes into making a desktop
There can be huge differences in the quality, just as there can be between the adjustable frames that lift them up. It’s not only the wood but how it’s crafted, sanded, shaped and finished, it’s the finer details that make all the difference and it’s our attention to every detail that makes all the difference for our customers.
Sourcing the best standing desk for your budget, performance requirements and décor is the first step, you’ll also want to consider any accessories that will help to make your space truly ergonomic and keep your body in a neutral posture. And possibly the most important element but so often overlooked, having the tools in place to help affect behaviour change to ensure that more movement is at the heart of your working day and will continue to be from now on.
