SAN FRANCISCO - Restoration Hardware includes Salvaged Wood Collection furniture of reclaimed pine, oak and other timber from across Britain, oak and other hardwood silver trunks and wood-trimmed steamer trunks in a Fall 2011 616-page mega-catalog, its largest ever.

Among examples of unique hand woodwork in the catalog are a salvaged wood collection designed and built by Timothy Oulton in a workshop in China. It features classic lines and hand-carved details, deriving character from the 100-year-old pine Oulton uses to build them.

Oulton brought in seasoned furniture builders to his China workshop to train local artisans in traditional English joinery.

Reclaimed from distilleries, factories and other buildings across Great Britain, timbers arrive at Oulton’s workshop in odd lots, weathered and filled with rusty nails.

"When you see the timber arrive from the U.K., the fact that we ever make a table out of it is a miracle,” Oulton says in a catalog article relating the story of his furnishings. Nails are removed, planks sorted. 

Once sorted, the timbers are cut, shaped and joined using carpentry methods that would have been familiar to English furniture crafters of the 19th century, Oulton says. Rather than traditional stain and lacquer, Oulton leaves the pieces raw with their unfinished patina. 

Oulton says a Palladian three-door bookcase "spends 60-odd days in the carpentry shop – six people, 10 days – and we’re just talking about assembly. Before that, the wood has to be selected. Then cut. Then dried. Then, after the carpentry shop, it has to be dried again, assembled again, all the glass fitted.”

The Restoration Hardware catalog features a dozen pages of cabinetry hardware, as well as many other examples of fine furnishings. A hand-built silverware trunk of solid hardwood, for example, accented with hand-forged, hand-hammered iron hardware, features internal tray shelves for storage and  pneumatic regulators that allow the lid to close gently. Wood features a hand-applied natural finish