What is the best finish for a dining table?
What is the best finish for a dining table?
Choosing the right finish for your project is a matter of thinking about how you’re going to use the table, and how you feel about the refinishing process. We offer two types of finish, one oil and one urethane. The oil finish is a wipe-on, while the urethane is a two-part spray-on finish that we apply in our professional spray room. Each product we use is top-of-the-line in its category, and each offers excellent resistance to wear and staining, but there are minor aesthetic and performance differences.
Here at Cannon Hill, our finishing oil of choice is Rubio Monocoat. After years of experience and extensive testing with a wide range of finishes, we’ve yet to find another product that matches the beauty, consistency, durability, and simplicity of Rubio. The oils create a molecular bond with the wood fibers, lending the finish an appearance of natural depth that we and our clients always love.
An oil finish is an excellent choice for any project that will receive a standard amount of wear and tear. We’ve found Rubio to be extraordinarily resistant to spills and water rings so long as they’re attended to reasonably. Perhaps just as importantly, it allows for extremely easy touch-up if and when a client decides it’s time. A well-used, well-loved table is bound to take on character that reflects the home it inhabits over the years; what Rubio allows us to do is touch up and refinish tables in-place with a minimum of fuss.
One of the great qualities of Rubio Monocoat is the wide range of tints in which it’s available. The natural variations and variabilities of wood are precisely why we love it so much, so it’s important not to confuse the tints that Rubio offers with solid uniform coloration. The tinted oils bond molecularly with the wood fiber, with all the grain patterns and figure present in the unfinished material on full, glorious display.
We also offer a 2K urethane spray finish, by Milesi, which is our recommendation for projects that are likely to be subject to substantial wear and tear. Our in-house spray finishers mix and apply the two-part, matte product right here in our Roxbury workshop for each piece of furniture. The spray-on urethane offers the ultimate in protection and durability, ensuring the beauty of your furniture for years to come. This resistance means that the refinishing process requires that the piece go out to a finisher, whether Cannon Hill or someone else, to be stripped to bare wood and completely refinished, unlike oil.
Because of the way it builds on the wood – rather than soaking in like oil would – a spray finish will have a slightly higher sheen than oil. Finish sheen is rated on a scale of 0-100, and our standard finish is a 10, so it’s very much still matte, but it reflects light with a little more definition.
We also recommend a spray finish when a client is particularly interested in minimizing the color effects that the finish will have on the wood. Basically all clear finishes will have at least a slight warming effect on the material, and in some cases that’s not what the table calls for. When we’re using maple, for example, and a client wants to preserve the pale, cool colors of the wood we’ll use spray. Maple turns a particularly deep, warm gold, when it gets oiled, whereas our spray will have only a fraction of that effect.
Reach out to learn more
Choosing a finish is an important part of the custom furniture process, so it’s worth thinking seriously about the options before you. We always take the time to talk through all the considerations with our clients, and make sure that everything’s been weighed up.
