Macassar Ebony Veneer

Macassar ebony — Diospyros celebica, from Sulawesi — is the striped ebony: a dark brown to black ground crossed by bands of amber and tan that run the length of the leaf. It is the veneer people picture when they say luxury, and unlike most dark timbers it gets its drama from contrast rather than from depth of color alone.

Ebony logs are small, and that fact drives everything else. Leaves are narrow, so a wide elevation takes more of them and the joints are part of the composition whether you planned them or not. The stripe also has to align across those joints or the whole effect collapses — this is a species where sequencing is not a nicety, it is the difference between a feature wall and an expensive mistake. Slip-matched it reads as a continuous run; book-matched it mirrors into chevrons at every seam.

Lay the elevation out before the material is cut and order the run complete. Striping varies sharply between logs and there is no second flitch that will pass for the first. Supplied sequenced from a single flitch, raw, two-ply, paper-backed, or pressed to architectural panels.