BUILD STORY  ·  DINING  ·  HEARTWOOD COLLECTION

Building the Dal: Solid Ash, Start to Finish

Why I chose ash for the Heartwood Collection's first dining table — and what building it from scratch in a small shop actually looks like.

By Mallory     ·     2026     ·     7 min read

The Heartwood Collection was never supposed to include a dining table. I designed it around shippable accent pieces — a shelf, a side table, a plant stand, an entryway table. Things one person could build in a weekend and pack into a single box.

Then the requests started. Not occasionally — consistently. People who had already bought a shelf or a side table asking the same question: do you make dining tables? Enough times that I stopped being able to ignore it. So I built one. This is how it happened.

Why Ash

Ash does not get the attention walnut does. It is not as dark, not as dramatic, not as immediately striking. What it is: harder than walnut, harder than white oak, and more flexible than either. That combination — hardness and flexibility together — makes it the traditional chair wood of Scandinavian and American craft furniture for good reason. 

For a dining table that will see daily use — plates, glasses, elbows, the occasional dropped fork — ash is exactly the right material. Its open grain takes an oil finish beautifully, developing warmth and depth over years rather than looking the same at year ten as it did on day one. And its pale, creamy tone photographs well, which matters when your marketing lives on Instagram.

I also wanted the Dal to feel different from the rest of the Heartwood Collection without feeling disconnected from it. The walnut pieces are dark and rich. Ash brings a lighter, more Scandinavian character — still the same joinery language, the same finish approach, the same maker's style — but in a material that suits a room differently.

The Build

I started at my local lumber yard, selecting boards by hand. Four wide boards for the top, arranged on the yard floor before buying — matching grain direction so the glue lines would read as a continuous slab. Ash can be figured, with dramatic cathedral grain that catches the light. I wanted some of that. Not too much.

Milling is the part of woodworking that nobody photographs. But the more patience you have now, the better things will go down the road. 

I start with the planner and get one side perfectly flat. Since I don’t have a jointer, I use the method of attaching two boards together with scraps and ripping the space between them on the table saw. The blade removes material from both and creates a perfect joint. Then, it’s back to the planner to bring the material down to it’s correct thickness. 

The glue-up of a 70-inch top is where builds go wrong. And I’ve made plenty of mistakes before. I use a biscuit joiner to help with aligning all the boards. Then, I’ll even run a test fit with no glue, just to be sure. I also use cauls — stiff boards clamped perpendicular to the glue lines — to keep it flat. Forty-eight hours in the clamps. Then scraping squeeze-out, a little planning to ensure no misalignment at the joints, and three grits of sandpaper from 80 to 180. The top of a dining table is the most touched surface in any home. It deserves the time to get it right.

Then, the real work begins. 

The base is the piece that makes the Dal a Heartwood table. Two A-frame leg assemblies in solid ash, connected by a through-tenon stretcher running the full length between them. The stretcher passes through both frames and is locked with a bottom screw, shh no one will see. But the joints on the base - that’s what we want to see. 

Cutting the A-frame would require compound angles — but it makes things easier and more accurate, if you make a template. And that’s what I prefer. I start by drawing a life-size version of the frame. Then I can cut and fit my pieces perfectly to my lines, no math involved. I used simple oak dowels to connect the pieces together, but it also makes for a subtle accent point to the table. 

The Finish

I finished the Dal with hardwax oil — more durable than danish oil for a surface that sees food, water, and heat daily. It penetrates rather than sitting on top, so you are touching the wood directly rather than a film of lacquer. It can be refreshed locally: if one area gets scratched or worn, sand lightly and apply a new coat without refinishing the whole surface. A dining table needs a finish you can maintain yourself, indefinitely, without professional help.

Two coats, hand-applied, and buffed between. The ash came alive on the first wipe — the grain opened up. We used a cotton white color to really like the grain shine. This is the moment every build is working toward. Everything else is preparation for this.

The Dal is the Heartwood piece I am most proud of. Not because it is the most technically demanding — it is — but because it is the most consequential. A dining table stays. It becomes the place where things happen. When I set the chairs around it and stepped back, it looked exactly like it was always going to look. Some builds feel accidental. This one did not.

The Dal table will be available soon. Reach out to pre-order yours. 

Stay tuned for the set of chairs to go with it!