Particleboard Takes on a
New Role in Home Design

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- Most people think of particleboard as a cheap slab of wood chips and glue.

Dixie Roberts Junk thinks warmth and texture. "You can really achieve anything you want with it," says Ms. Junk, an architect here. To prove the point, Junk Architects, the business she runs with her husband, used caramel-colored squares of particleboard to cover the floor of its office.

Designers like Ms. Junk are starting to find beauty in particleboard, medium-density fiberboard -- known as MDF -- and other so-called composite or engineered woods. These boards have long lurked under veneers, laminates or foils printed to look like solid wood. Now, in some cases, they are shedding their skins and appearing on the surface of furniture, cabinets, closet doors and molding.

Particleboard Exposed

Michael Love, a designer in New York, uses exposed composite woods for cabinets and closet doors. With a coat or two of clear finish, she says, they take on a "kraft paper look."

In Minneapolis, Blu Dot Design & Manufacturing Inc. recently designed an $89 coffee table with exposed particleboard edges. "It actually looks kind of cool," says John Christakos, president of Blu Dot. "We worried people would say, 'Oh, ick, see the particleboard.' That hasn't happened."

For those still inclined to say "ick" at the sight of particleboard, the message is simple: Get used to it. Because of restrictions on logging, beautiful pieces of mahogany and oak are increasingly expensive and hard to find; composite, on the other hand, is cheap and abundant. Just as hot-dog makers use parts of the animal that would otherwise be wasted, makers of composites grind up branches, small trees, sawmill scrap and inferior wood that otherwise couldn't be used for furniture. Some even use wheat straw or other agricultural waste.

Composites of all kinds, including plywood, accounted for about a third of total U.S. wood production in 1997, the latest year for which figures are available, up from 5% in 1950. This steady advance of composites, which is expected to continue, is largely a matter of cost. At Home Depot Inc. stores, a 1-by-6-foot board designed for shelving costs about $4.20 in MDF or $33 in high-grade solid oak. Bookcases at IKEA stores in the U.S. range from about $40 for particleboard models to $400 for pine.

Another consideration is that the quality of composites has improved. Computerized machinery produces more consistent, reliable boards. Better glues make veneers less likely to peel off. Meanwhile, the quality of solid lumber has deteriorated: Because there are fewer giant old trees to chop down, timber companies rely on young, fast-growing trees, whose wood tends to be weaker.

Certain Pluses

Unlike solid wood, many composites offer a uniform density with no knots or other flaws, making them more suited to mass production. Shaping MDF is "like cutting into a big block of cheese," says Brian Alexander, a designer at Haworth Inc., a maker of office furniture. Composites also are less prone to expand or contract with changes in humidity.

The result is that composites show up everywhere. They are familiar in cheap bookcases and other assemble-it-yourself furniture. But composites also hide beneath hand-burnished veneers on $15,000 dining tables from Karges Furniture Co., in Evansville, Ind. High-end furniture makers like Karges and Niermann Weeks Co., of Millersville, Md., don't play up their use of composites. When asked, though, they say composite cores make the furniture less likely to warp. "We use it very discreetly," says Joe Niermann, chairman of Niermann Weeks.

Composites, whether exposed or concealed, also are common in kitchen cabinets, countertops, speaker boxes, store shelves and car parts. Panels for roofs, exterior walls and floors of many new houses are made of oriented strandboard, or OSB, a composite manufactured from strands of wood. (In these applications, OSB is replacing plywood.) Brett Bros. Bat Co. makes baseball bats from three pieces of northern white ash glued together, instead of the traditional solid ash. Even cheap coffins are made of composite.

Big makers of building materials, such as Georgia-Pacific Corp. and Willamette Industries Inc., have turned to composites over the past few decades largely as a way to use sawdust and other wood scrap. Before composites, much of that scrap was burned. "At night, the whole sky was red," says Thomas M. Maloney, who grew up in the sawmill town of Raymond, Wash., in the 1940s and later was a pioneer in developing composites at Washington State University. After World War II, says Mr. Maloney, German timber-processing companies perfected methods of making particleboard and began producing it on a large scale. U.S. producers followed suit in the 1950s.

To make particleboard, producers grind wood into bits, mix in resins, which act as glue, and then use hot presses to shape the mixture into board. The production of MDF is similar, except that the wood is ground much finer, into clusters of fiber that look like cotton before being compressed into boards. That process produces the fine grain of MDF, whose surface resembles that of a chocolate malt.

Not as Sexy as Corian

Early versions of composite woods often were of low quality, crumbling when pierced with a screw or swelling at the edges when wet. The manufacturers treated the boards as cheap commodities and didn't bother with marketing to consumers. Humdrum names such as particleboard and MDF did nothing to enhance the boards' image. By contrast, when DuPont Co. in the late 1960s came up with a synthetic material for countertops, made of acrylic and alumina, it devised an easy-to-remember name, Corian, and successfully promoted it to consumers as something worthwhile.

Ms. Junk and her husband, Robert, figured there must be a way to make particleboard look classy, too. Four years ago, after moving their architectural firm to Kansas City from New York, they bought particleboard for a counter in their home office. When they searched a paint store for a suitable stain, clerks were baffled; particleboard, they explained, was supposed to be covered by veneer, not stained. "It will look ugly," Ms. Junk recalls being warned. But the Junks persevered. They stained their particleboard brownish-red.

When Junk Architects moved into a 95-year-old building overlooking the Missouri River, they decided to experiment further. For the flooring, they had particleboard cut into squares, lightly sanded and coated with polyurethane. "People have a hard time believing that it's actually just particleboard," says Mr. Junk. Some mistake it for cork.

For a conference table, the Junks used rectangles of particleboard stained blue or red, surrounded by a border of MDF, coated with a clear lacquer. The table, produced from materials costing $254, won an award from the local chapter of the American Institute of Architects.

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