Bamboo: Five Years in the Making
When we arrive in Bali and see the stalks stacked up in the workshop, it's easy to take the material for granted. There they are — smooth, firm, with that color that shifts from ivory to ochre. But behind every stalk lie years of growth, a curing process that can't be rushed, and a knowledge that the families we work with have been refining for generations. This week we want to tell you a little more about bamboo: where it comes from, how it's prepared, and where you'll find it in what we make.
A forest that renews itself
Bamboo is not a tree. It's a grass — part of the same family as wheat or rice, though with a very different presence. In Bali it grows on hillsides, riverbanks, and land that isn't suited to other crops. A single stalk can reach full maturity in around five years, which in the world of timber is almost nothing.
That has one important practical consequence: when a mature stalk is cut, the root system doesn't die. It stays alive and keeps sending up new shoots. There's no need to replant, no need to wait decades. That doesn't mean bamboo is limitless or that it can be used without care, but it does mean the families who cultivate it can manage it in a way that other materials simply don't allow. We see it whenever we visit the workshops: there's an order to the harvest, a respect for the younger stalks that aren't ready yet.
Cutting at exactly the right moment
Not every stalk will do. Bamboo that's too young has thin walls and low density; bamboo that's too old starts to lose flexibility and becomes brittle. The craftspeople we work with know how to read a stalk — the color, the texture of the surface, even the sound it makes when you tap it.
The timing of the cut matters too. Balinese tradition recommends harvesting at certain times of year, when the starch concentration inside the stalk is at its lowest. That starch is precisely what attracts insects, so reducing it from the very start is already part of the treatment. This isn't folklore — there's a solid practical logic behind it that craftspeople have tested and confirmed over time. We're no experts in this ourselves, but we do pay attention when they explain it to us.
How the bamboo is protected against insects
This is the question we get asked most. Untreated bamboo is vulnerable: the starch it contains attracts certain insects that can hollow it out from the inside without anything showing on the surface until it's too late. That's why treatment is an essential part of the process, not an optional extra.
The most common method we see in the workshops we collaborate with is soaking in water — sometimes combined with natural salts — over an extended period. The aim is to wash the starch out of the interior of the stalk. After that comes drying, which has to be slow and controlled to stop the bamboo from cracking. Rushing the drying ruins all the work that came before it. Some workshops also use heat as part of this process. We won't claim that every method is the same, or that we can verify every single step, but we do choose to work with families who show us what they do and explain why they do it.
The drying time is non-negotiable
One of the things that took us longest to understand at the beginning is that in this kind of work there are timelines that simply cannot be compressed. Treated bamboo needs to dry at its own pace. If the process is forced, cracks appear, the stalk warps, or the treatment hasn't penetrated properly — and the problem resurfaces months later, once the piece is already in a customer's home.
That has a direct impact on our lead times. When we finalize an order in Bali, we know that part of the wait is out of our hands — and out of the craftspeople's hands too. It depends on the bamboo. That can create pressure, especially when we're hoping to have something ready by a specific date. But we've learned to respect it. A stalk that hasn't dried properly doesn't improve with time; if anything, the opposite is true. And we'd rather wait than send out something that's going to cause problems down the line.
Where bamboo shows up in what we make
Bamboo isn't the only material we work with, but it's one of the most present. You'll find it in structures, frames, storage pieces, and some decorative elements where being both light and sturdy at the same time is hard to achieve with anything else.
What we love most about bamboo is that it doesn't try to be something it's not. It doesn't imitate wood or metal. It has its own visual language: the nodes, the subtle variation in tone from one stalk to the next, the way it ages when it's looked after. When a well-made, well-treated bamboo piece arrives, you can feel it. We don't need to spell it out — the solidity speaks for itself. And that, having seen the whole process from the forest to the workshop, still strikes us as something worth talking about.
Thank you for reading this far. If you're curious to see which bamboo pieces we have in stock right now, come by the store whenever you like. And if there's something about the materials we bring over from Bali that you'd like us to write about, drop us a line — these letters are shaped by what you're curious about too.
