We start in the forest

Nordic Masur works out of eastern Finland, in the region where curly birch has been cut for handles and boxes for centuries.

We are timber people rather than a distributor with a website. The whole chain sits here: buying standing trees from Finnish forest owners, felling, sawing, drying, grading, photographing, packing. Nothing arrives as finished stock on a pallet from somewhere else, which is the only reason we can answer the questions we get asked.

Why we walk the stands ourselves

Because curly birch cannot be bought sight unseen and be any good. One or two birch in a hundred carry the figure, the outside signs are unreliable, and two stems of the same diameter can want completely different cutting. If you buy by the lorry load and sort afterwards, you end up with a yard full of wood you cannot sell and a price that has to carry the mistake.

So it is done the slow way. Someone walks the stand, marks the trees, and is there again when they are opened at the saw. It is not romantic. It is the only method that produces a shed where most of what is in it is worth selling.

If we cannot tell you which tree a log or slab came from, we have already lost the thing that makes us worth buying from.

Why we say where the wood comes from

Figured birch is easy to misrepresent. Once a board is sawn and planed, nobody can tell whether it grew in Finland, came in through three intermediaries, or was cut from a stem felled in the wrong season. The trade has always had a bit of this, and the people it hurts are makers who bought on trust and found out later.

We tell you the origin because we can. Region, felling season, how long it air-dried, where in the log the piece sat. It costs nothing to say when it is true, and it is impossible to say when it is not.

The same instinct runs through the grading. Naming defects out loud loses the occasional order. It also means that when we say a piece is clean, a customer believes it.

What we are not

We are not big. There are seasons when a size is simply gone, and there is no warehouse in another country to pull it from. We are not a hardwood merchant either; we do one species and its close relations, and if your project would be better in maple or ash, we will say so and you can go and buy maple.

What we do have is every stage of one wood under one roof, and a strong preference for telling customers the awkward part first. The background on the species is on the curly birch page, and what we actually cut is on the products page.