Madera
Daniel Clason-Hook, founding partner of Madera, talks about how he got into wood flooring and creating the company.
Olympus - Apollo ©Madera
FAME: Where are you from and how did your passion for wood start?
DCH: I was born in Malmö, Sweden, and spent the first 8 years of my life between Mozambique, Stockholm, Sweden, and San Salvador, El Salvador. My parents both worked internationally which led to a ton of travel and re-locations for my brother and me. We ended up in Western Massachusetts where my mother completed her Doctoral thesis at the University of Massachusetts. This is where I grew up and this is where I first encountered carpentry and furniture making and where I developed a love of wood, woodworking, and the beauty and utility of trees.
During college, I lived in the hills north of Amherst in an 1815 saltbox house with some good friends. The house had a converted horse stable next to it that served as the woodshop of a talented artist named Ethan Fiero. Ethan had trained under a master of Japanese woodwork and used the shop to produce custom furniture, stone sculptures, and traditional Japanese shoji screens. I started working with Ethan on the weekends and evenings in-between classes and my studies.
Eventually, I incorporated the work I did with Ethan into my studies and was therefore able to spend more time in the shop and on-site during installations. I was hooked!
FAME: Why did you start Madera?
DCH: I spent a year in Afghanistan in 2010 after graduating with a master’s degree in International Development at the New School in NYC. It was in Kabul that I had my first experience with entrepreneurialism. By the end of the year, I was working for myself as a consultant to several local NGOs and small, local businesses.
When I returned to NYC, I couldn’t imagine going to work for someone else. At the same time, my brother Mikael was living in the city and our good friend James Robb, who I had worked with on and off for several years, was also itching to move on from his day-to-day. We didn’t know exactly what we wanted to do but we were focused on materials, sustainability, design, and accessibility.
We spent several months brainstorming and developing a business plan that centered around high-quality, sustainable wood products, and after a year full of pivots, wins and losses, we launched MADERA.
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FAME: What makes Madera better than other wood floorings?
DCH: What makes MADERA different than most flooring companies is that we never settle. We are always pushing for change and have built a company rooted in the culture of exploration. Design is at the heart of what we do. We have a four-person design team headed up by an immensely talented Architect. Having an in-house design team allows us to develop new products and services. Our floors are at the core of our product line, but we also offer cabinetry fronts, architectural millwork, and interior doors. All these products work seamlessly with our curated collections of floors giving designers and architects a simple tool for seamless wood design.
Our floors are made using only the highest quality materials from the top manufacturing regions in the world including West Flanders, Belgium, Bavaria, Germany, and more locally, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, and even right here in Los Angeles. The most important factor in high-quality wood flooring is the sourcing, selection, curing, and milling of the wood. French and European oak makes up the bulk of our flooring, but we also work with American White Oak, Ash, Black Walnut, Douglas Fir, and European Elm. Regardless of the species of wood, the key is quality. It really all starts with the wood and knowing how logs are sourced and selected is the first step in producing high-quality flooring.
By purchasing logs directly from the source, we can produce wood flooring in dimensions that most other companies cannot. Typical wood floors come in standard widths up to 12 inches and lengths that max out at 12-14 feet. Our Volant and Atelier collections are available up to 25 inches in width and 35-foot lengths without compromising the quality of the wood and grading.
Finishing is another area where MADERA separates itself from the competition. Relying on a combination of technology and generational craft we produce finishes with unparalleled depth and natural texture. Rarely do we use dyes or stains to achieve color, relying instead on reactive stains, natural plant-based botanicals, and oils to produce a range of extraordinary finishes.
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FAME: What are three common misconceptions people have about wood flooring?
DCH:
People often confuse engineered wood flooring with laminate or LVT flooring which is not real wood. Our engineered flooring is always manufactured using the highest quality solid wood top layers and either a Baltic birch plywood substrate or a pine core three-ply system we prefer for our super wide plank material.
People often think that oiled floors are harder to maintain than floors with a polyurethane topcoat. Although we offer both finishes, we prefer oil. Oiled floors wear more naturally than poly floors and it’s quite easy to maintain a floor that has been finished with oils. That said, not all oiled floors are equal. A Madera oiled floor is finished with at least three layers of robust oils that protect your floors from wear and tear. A single coat of oil or a poorly applied oil will not do the trick.
Natural grading equals a lower-quality floor. The idea that a floor that has knots, checks, and character is inherently a lower-quality floor is not true. Quality has to do with the structure of the wood, the way the wood was cured and milled, and the manufacturing methods employed. The grade of a floor is a question of aesthetics, not quality. There are poorly graded floors of course. Floors that have tons of sap in them or that just don’t look good. That’s why we use the term “handsome character” to describe the way we grade flooring.
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FAME: How big is your team and who is part of it?
DCH: Madera has a team of twenty people in four cities (New York, Los Angeles, Salt Lake City, and Nairobi Kenya). Our four-person design + marketing team is headed up by Kristin Washco (PhD. in Architecture from McGill university.) The production team is led by Daniel Luscombe who has been with Madera for eight years. Operations are led by partner Mikael Clason-Hook and Jennifer Heister who is our longest-tenured employee. Our six sales managers are led by me and partner James Robb who is the head of MADERA commercial with a focus on high-end multi-unit residential projects as well as commercial clients like Equinox, Peloton, Lucid motors, and Le Labo.
FAME: What is your design/ fabrication process?
DCH: Madera products, including our collection finishes, are designed in-house by our design team in collaboration with our various vendors. The Madera shop, which is in Los Angeles, serves as our lab and prototyping center where we can explore materials, try new product ideas, and work on new finishes. Once a product makes it past the design phase, it moves on to the production floor at one of our partner facilities. We test the viability of the design and judge whether the design can be replicated “on the line.” The idea is to design products that can be fabricated with a high level of efficiency without sacrificing quality. We want to offer products whose quality outperforms their cost. To do that we need good design, quality materials, and technologically advanced manufacturing.
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FAME: What do you love most about what you do?
DCH: I love being a part of the design community and hopefully contributing to the advancement and innovation of wood products. I also love managing a business. It’s quite challenging and the bigger we get the more challenging it becomes. We have a truly amazing group of young and talented people helping us realize our vision. It’s not lost on me how special that is and how fortunate we are to have this opportunity to build a genuinely exciting and successful business.
FAME: What are 3 tips for selecting wood flooring?
DCH: Make sure you know where and how the floors are made. Just because the floor is made with European oak, does not mean the floors were made in Europe. If you don’t know where your floors are made, how can you know how the floors were made?
A good rule of thumb when it comes to wood flooring is this: you get what you pay for! There is no way to buy high-quality wood cheaply. There is no way to manufacture a high-quality floor while cutting corners and saving costs. At the same time, just because a floor is very expensive does not mean it is high quality or that you are getting what you pay for. Be smart, and ask the vendor why the price is what it is. If it doesn’t make sense, there may be a good reason to be skeptical. That goes both ways.
Samples are indicative of color and texture only. Try to understand the full scope of the floor and how it will look once installed. It’s fine to fall in love with the perfect sample, but wood flooring is a natural material that has tons of variation. Remember that wood flooring is made from trees. There are no two trees alike. Each wood floor is as unique as the trees they come from.
©Madera