Black Forest Wood turned an idea into tables and furniture now sought after world-wide.

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River tables are raging in luxury home design.

Composed of remnant, live-edge wood cast in colourful epoxy or resin, the river table phenomenon has bubbled up here in Calgary and around the world. It’s a special effect used to create dining room tables, office desks, cabinets, barn doors and shuffleboard tables. It’s made by pouring resin into a mold with slabs of reclaimed wood. The resin, which can be coloured or clear, flows around the natural curves of the wood. The resin product takes a week to cure in a climate controlled area.

Calgary wood product manufacturer and supplier, Black Forest Wood, isn’t laying claim to inventing river tables, but general manager Dylan Thomas says they were one of the first to create them using resin and likely the first to showcase the idea on social media.

Their first “pour” took place in 2017.

“I needed a video to post on Instagram because I didn’t have anything that day,” says Thomas, explaining that Black Forest had a respectable social following at that time. “We had a resin product that we sold in our store to artists, and I decided to pour it between two pieces of wood. I had seen people make river tables before using glass and I thought, there’s no reason why we couldn’t do the same thing with epoxy.”

Thomas filmed it, posted it to Instagram and it garnered 3 million views. A media company picked it up, taking that single post to 140 million views.

“That completely transformed our business and our online presence in a short amount of time,” says the 29-year-old, whose father founded Black Forest in 1993 as a manufacturer of solid wood exterior doors.

The waste wood created in door making sparked interest in opening a retail store to sell off-cuts, which evolved into a woodworking and supply division of the business. Thomas began his career at the age of 14 and now handles the marketing and design.

Today, Black Forest ships river tables and other resin-pour products around the world.

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“Our biggest market is the United States, but we had a prince in Qatar order a Quran stand to use in the mosques. We made a couple to start and will likely do a large volume for him,” says Thomas. “We also have celebrity clientele, like Zedd, a DJ in California — we did a coffee table for him and personally delivered it. And a table for (actors) Joe Manganiello and Sofia Vergara. We’ll deliver it to them and meet them, too. That will be exciting.”

Like many customers, Manganiello found Black Forest on Instagram and messaged him through the social platform.

“I literally got a DM and I had to look twice. He found us on his own and thought we did cool stuff,” he says.

Each resin table is a statement piece that fetches a fair price. Because of the cure time and space constraints, they can only make two or three resin products at a time. Each piece makes use of discarded wood that can’t be used for anything else but firewood.

“You capture the character of the tree even with its imperfections. That’s my favourite part — highlighting organic materials and no two pieces can ever be the same,” Thomas says.

Katie Rioux, creative director and founder of DWK Interiors, also found Black Forest on Instagram and ordered a 14-foot dining table and a shuffleboard table for clients who were building a luxury home.

“We were designing this space that they called an event space — not a dining room, but an event space. We wanted something really cool,” says Rioux, who helped her clients choose a wood slab for the table. “It looks like there’s a massive tree in the centre with black resin poured around it. The wood is rustic, but the home is not rustic at all — it’s very luxury-modern. With the different ways they make these tables, we were able to keep that modern look and fit the client’s home.”

Rioux also asked Black Forest if they could make a resin-pour shuffleboard table for her client’s basement.

“They said, why not?” she says.

Thomas says that after developing their resin-table technique for two years, they attempted new products. The first non-table resin pour they did was a piece of wall art, then moved onto a Claro walnut burl resin cabinet which was so nice, they kept it.

“We use traditional joinery techniques that we have experience in and combined it with the epoxy technology we came up with and it paired beautifully,” he says.

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