Alder vs White Oak vs Walnut for Mountain Homes

The USDA Forest Products Laboratory’s Wood Handbook describes red alder as varying from almost white to pale pinkish brown with no visible boundary between heartwood and sapwood — a pale, even wood whose knotty grade carries its character in the knots. Sold as knotty alder, it is the vocabulary of the timber-frame lodge and the ranch kitchen, and it takes a medium or dark stain evenly enough to be pushed toward whatever the beams and the stone ask for. In a great room with a fieldstone chimney and exposed trusses, alder is the species that looks as though it arrived with the house.

The Handbook describes white oak’s sapwood as nearly white and its heartwood as generally greyish brown, with heartwood pores usually plugged with tyloses and, on quartersawn faces, the broad and conspicuous rays that the trade calls fleck. Rift-sawn, between the two cuts, it shows a straight, quiet grain without the fleck, and that rift grain is the mountain-modern default: pale, linear and calm against black steel, honed stone and large glazing. Quartered oak reads older, and suits a Craftsman cabin in Tahoe City better than a glass box above Incline.

Black walnut, in the Handbook’s words, has heartwood varying from light to dark brown and sapwood that is nearly white and up to three inches wide in open-grown trees, which is why walnut stock is sorted for colour or steamed to even it. It is normally straight grained, and the Handbook notes that its good properties and interesting grain pattern make it much valued for furniture, architectural woodwork and decorative panels. In a lakefront great room walnut is the warm element against stone, steel and glass, and it is the one of the three that owners choose for a single piece — an island face, a run of drawer fronts — as much as for the whole kitchen.

A heated Sierra interior in January runs dry, and the Handbook’s equilibrium table gives the consequence at 70 degrees Fahrenheit: 9.2 percent moisture content at 50 percent relative humidity, 6.2 percent at 30 percent and 4.5 percent at 20 percent. Our altitude and moisture spoke explains why that happens and what a three-point swing does to a door; this page needs only the species figures. The Handbook’s shrinkage table, green to oven-dry, puts red alder at 4.4 percent radial and 7.3 tangential, black walnut at 5.5 and 7.8, and white oak at 5.6 and 10.5. Its dimensional-change coefficients for the 6 to 14 percent range are 0.00151 radial and 0.00256 tangential for alder, 0.00190 and 0.00274 for walnut, and 0.00180 and 0.00365 for commercial white oak.

Read across, the numbers sort the three in two different orders. Flat-sawn, alder moves least, walnut a little more and white oak much more: oak’s tangential coefficient is roughly 40 percent higher than walnut’s and the tangential figure is what governs a flat-sawn board’s width. Quartersawn, the radial coefficient governs, and the order changes: oak at 0.00180 moves less than walnut at 0.00190, and alder at 0.00151 still least. Walnut’s two coefficients are the closest together of the three, which means it distorts least in section whatever the cut, and that quartersawing buys it little. White oak’s are the furthest apart, which is why rift and quartersawn oak is specified for the wide components of a mountain kitchen and flat-sawn oak is not.

Those are the species figures. The panel arithmetic — what a 24-inch door panel in each species actually does over a winter — is worked in our species for alpine homes spoke and is not repeated here. The decision this page is about is simpler. If the kitchen will carry wide solid components, alder and walnut forgive the cut and white oak demands it. And whichever species is chosen, ANSI/AWI 0641-2019 takes most of the movement question off the species and puts it on the construction: solid lumber door panels are not permitted at Premium grade at all, and at Custom and Economy grade an edge-glued solid flat panel must be at least 12.7 millimetres thick and no more than 350 millimetres wide, so wide panels and tall doors go to veneer-core construction whatever the face species.

Choose knotty alder for a timber-frame or log house, a stone hearth and a ranch vernacular, with a stain chosen against the beams, a durable finish, and the toe kicks and island ends in something harder if the house is let. Choose rift or quartersawn white oak for a glass-walled lakefront house or a contemporary Truckee build, with the cut named on the drawings — ANSI/AWI 0641-2019 requires exposed transparent-finish material to be of the specified species and cut — under a clear or lightly stained finish, and expect it to deepen slowly in the light. Choose black walnut where the room wants warmth against stone and steel, for a whole kitchen or for the island and drawer fronts within an oak or painted one, under a clear finish, and expect it to lighten.

Then check the use. A second home visited a few weeks a year, as our seasonal occupancy spoke describes, asks less of hardness and more of stability; a house that is full every holiday asks the reverse. Then let the construction carry the movement: panels wider than the standard’s 350-millimetre solid-lumber limit, and every panel at Premium grade, in veneer-core construction whatever the species; solid stock in the stiles, rails and narrower components; and the cut named wherever the species is oak. The pricing engine does not weight species — the difference between the three is a material quotation on the drawings, not a multiplier — so the decision is free to be made on the room, the use and the light. PineWood builds all three in Rocklin and delivers over the passes to Lake Tahoe and Truckee; on the Nevada shore we supply only.