Cremation Urn Wood Types

Our wood cremation urns come in many styles using a variety of quality woods. Here is a brief description of each type of wood urn available in our store.

Cherry

The rich reddish-brown tones of cherry wood, which darken with time and exposure to light, have made cherry a popular and beautiful wood choice for finely crafted furniture products for centuries. The enduring popularity of cherry wood comes from the vibrant red coloring and simple, straight, and elegant lines of the wood grain. A moderate hardwood with great strength while still remaining very lightweight, the lush beauty of cherry wood makes our Designer Cherry Urn a perennial favorite.

Cherry Wood - Cremation Urns

Mahogany

Most of our mahogany urns are made with the Khaya, or African, variety of mahogany. A medium-weight hardwood that has become a classic of fine furniture makers, mahogany has deep reddish-brown tones with interlocking and variable grain. Our line of mahogany cremation urns cannot be beaten for simple and beautiful designs with quality wood at an affordable price.

Mahogany Wood Cremation Urns

Maple

Maple has been a standard wood used for making furniture in America for generations, even since the colonial days. Most of our maple urns are made with white maple, which is generally straight-grained with the occasional (and highly decorative) burl or "birds-eye" grain texture. Maple is a heavy wood, noted for its strength, durability, and resistance to abrasion. A stunning wood choice for our series of Dimensional Art Cremation Urns.

Maple Wood Cremation Urns

Morado

Also known as Bolivian Rosewood, Morado hardwood is a very heavy and dense wood. With its chocolate tones swaying between brown and a dark-brown-violet, Morado is a South American staple in fine furniture products and decorative veneers. While the grain varies between straight and irregular, it is always lustrous with the occasional walnut fragrance. A gorgeous exotic hardwood.

Morado Wood Cremation Urns

Oak

Oak is a hard wood, heavy, tought, and strong, with open grain. One of the most durable woods, it is a standard in furniture making and thus a standard wood type in the cremation urn industry. An oak tree's durability comes from its long, slow growth process, which results in hardwood of extraordinary density and strength. When stained, as most of our oak urns are, a striking grain pattern is revealed making it an ideal wood for a memorial.

Oak Wood Cremation Urn

Purpleheart

Or, sometime known as Purple Heart. Used for decorative touches on a few of our cremation urns, Purpleheart wood is hard, heavy and finely textured, with a grain that is usually straight, often with a fine, curly figure. The wood takes a glossy, lustrous finish.

Purpleheart Wood Cremation Urns

Radiata (Pine)

Radiata pine is classed as a medium-density softwood. Radiata pine clearwood (wood that is free of defects such as knots, holes or other blemishes) is one of the world's best clearwoods and one of the world's most widely planted plantation species because it has the ability to grow to a large diameter faster than almost any other tree species. When planed to a smooth finish, the wood is creamy-coloured, with stripes created by the contrast between wood grown early in the annual growth season (softer and paler) and that grown later (harder and darker). The wood darkens over time with exposure to light. Many of our Bolivian urns are made from Radiata pine wood.

radiata-wood-urns-pine.jpg

Walnut

There are several varieties of walnut wood from which our urns are made, depending on the manufacturer. A dark wood, most American walnut grows with either a straight grain or a very distinctive and highly figured grain. Both grain types result in a beautiful finished product, and you can see whether a particular wood urn is made with straight-grain walnut or variable-grain walnut by zooming in on a photo on an urn's product page. Walnut wood's hardness, strength, stability, and heaviness are the result of walnut being one of the largest hardwood trees grown in the United States.

Walnut Wood Cremation Urn

Sources:

Woodfinder's Wood Library

Domestic Woods: Characteristics

Quality Constructed Furniture: A Primer on Quality