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Dining Table
The Haywood
A straight-edge walnut or white oak dining table on a hand-tapered trestle base. Our most-requested piece, and the one we test every finish on.
from $4,8008–14 weeks
We are a small studio in West Asheville making dining tables, benches and heirloom pieces one at a time. Every board we cut comes from an Appalachian mill we know by name. Every joint is hand-fit. Every finish is oil and wax, applied slow enough that the wood learns the room it's going to.
These are the forms our studio returns to most often. Each one is built to a client's dimensions, species and finish; the price range gives you the honest ballpark before the quote.
A straight-edge walnut or white oak dining table on a hand-tapered trestle base. Our most-requested piece, and the one we test every finish on.
A single live-edge slab — walnut, cherry or maple — rested on a hand-welded steel A-frame. Finish choice of raw tung oil or hard wax for food service.
A low white oak bench with mortise-and-tenon legs — made to live at the foot of a bed or along a mudroom wall. Sits six feet or four, your call.
A four-door walnut sideboard with hand-cut dovetails and brass pulls we hammer in-house. Adjustable shelves, soft-close hinges, wine-friendly interior.
Hand-planed white oak or walnut floating shelves in pairs. Hidden steel rod mounting, finished on five sides so the end grain reads as warm as the face.
Walnut, cherry or hard maple edge-grain boards hand-flattened and oiled. The ones we send home with every client who orders a dining table.
Alder & Oak Woodworks opened in a 900-square-foot shop on Haywood Road in the fall of 2011. My partner Rhea and I had just moved back to Asheville from a year of apprenticeship — she with a joiner in Virginia, me in a hand-plane shop outside Kyoto — and we wanted a space where every piece we made could pass through both of our hands before it left.
Fourteen years later nothing about that premise has changed. We are still two makers. The shop is still 900 square feet. Our first bench press — a 1942 Oliver — still runs every Tuesday. We do not subcontract. We do not drop-ship. If a piece has our stamp on the underside it was built here, by us, on a timeline you and we agreed to.
We work primarily in Appalachian hardwoods: eastern black walnut, Carolina cherry, white oak, hard maple, ambrosia maple, sometimes figured hickory. Every board comes from one of four small mills within a two-hour drive — Hildebran, Weaverville, Micaville, Spruce Pine. We dry the lumber in our own kiln for 90 days after it leaves theirs. Nothing we touch has ever ridden a container ship.
A commission typically runs ten to fourteen weeks for a dining table, longer for case pieces. Here is every step of what happens between your first email and the day the piece lands in your room.
Call or visit the studio. We walk you through species, dimensions, the room it's going in and what you hope the piece to feel like in ten years.
Within a week we send a scaled drawing and a wood sample. Changes are free until the day we pull the first slab off the rack.
Lumber is picked, jointed, glued, planed, hand-shaped. We send a photo every Friday of your piece on the bench — same day we send one home to our own families.
We deliver in-house inside 200 miles of Asheville. Beyond that, a crated motor-freight crew we have used for a decade. We will come un-crate it with you if you are within range.
Furniture is a lived thing. These are from the people who live with ours.
"Our walnut Haywood table arrived in October. Thanksgiving dinner was the first meal on it — twelve people, three generations, nobody wanted to leave. Rhea called a week later to ask how the first oil coat was holding. Who does that?"
"I had nearly given up on finding a credenza that matched the proportions of our 1920s bungalow. The Reems piece Rhea sketched for us is the only thing in the house that looks like it was always there. Fourteen weeks, every Friday a photo. Worth every day of the wait."
"We are a family of five in a small house and the bench Alder & Oak made for our mudroom has absorbed every piece of winter gear, soccer practice, hiking boot and grocery haul since 2022. Still looks like the day it arrived."
"My partner commissioned the live-edge Pisgah slab as a thirtieth-birthday surprise. I did not know a piece of furniture could carry that kind of weight in a room. The table is now the first thing you see when you walk in our house, and every guest asks where it came from."
Open studio hours are Thursday to Saturday, 11am–6pm. If you are considering a commission we recommend booking a 30-minute visit so we can give you the full tour, show you species samples and sketch roughly together.
812 Haywood Rd · Studio B · Asheville, NC 28806