Oil vs PU — why we never put plastic on wood

A lacquered table looks its best the day it leaves the factory. An oiled table looks that good for years — and stays repairable the whole time. Here's the difference, in plain terms.

The finish that soaks in, rather than the one that sits on top.

You've decided on solid wood. Good — that's the decision that matters most. But two solid wood tables from two different makers can still age completely differently, and the reason usually comes down to one choice the maker made long before you saw the piece: how it was finished. Most wooden furniture sold in India is finished in polyurethane — PU, for short. It's fast, it's cheap, and on day one it looks flawless. Some makers go the other way and use a simple raw oil like linseed, which is honest but offers little real protection against heat, moisture, or spills. We take a third path — a modern hardwax oil — and it's worth explaining why.

The short version

PU is a plastic film that sits on top of the wood. A raw oil like linseed soaks in but barely protects. The modern hardwax oil we use soaks into the grain and hardens into real protection — shrugging off heat, cold, and spills the way a raw oil never could, while never becoming the dead plastic shell that PU does. That's the distinction — film versus fibre, and protection versus none — and it decides how the piece feels, how it ages, and whether you can ever repair it.

What PU actually is

Polyurethane is a clear plastic coating sprayed over the timber and cured into a hard shell. It seals the surface completely, which is exactly why factories love it: nothing penetrates, so it photographs perfectly and survives the warehouse. But a sealed surface is also a dead one. The wood underneath can no longer breathe, lighten, or darken — it's frozen at the moment it was sprayed.

The trouble starts when the shell is breached. A deep scratch, a hot pan, a few years of sunlight, and the film clouds, yellows, or peels. And because the damage is in the plastic, not the wood, you can't spot-fix it. The only honest repair is to strip the entire piece and re-spray it — a workshop job, not a weekend one.

There's a quieter concern too. PU is a petrochemical coating, and cured lacquer is not something most people think about living in daily contact with — on the table where they eat, the surface a child touches. Our oil, by contrast, is food-grade. It's the difference between a surface that's sealed off from you and one you can live against without a second thought.

What our oil does instead

Because the finish lives in the fibre, light damage lives there too — and the fibre can be tended. A scratch takes oil and softens. A water mark lifts with a cloth. You are caring for wood, which is forgiving, instead of a plastic shell, which is not.

We finish every piece with a food-grade Belgian hardwax oil, applied by hand in a single application that bonds molecularly with the wood fibres rather than forming a layer above them. This is the crucial difference from a raw oil like plain linseed: our oil doesn't just nourish the wood, it hardens into genuine everyday protection — against heat, cold, and spills — while a raw oil leaves the wood far more vulnerable. And unlike PU, the surface you touch is still wood, not a sheet of resin.

On open-grained woods like ash and oak, you can feel that openness under your fingers — the texture of real timber. On tighter woods like rosewood and teak, the same oil leaves a surface that's smooth to the touch. In every case, it's wood you're feeling, not plastic.

How they age

This is the part you can't see in a showroom, so here it is side by side — the same table, the same five years, our oil against a PU lacquer.

So which should you choose?

If you want a surface that never changes and never asks a thing of you — and you're content to replace it when the film eventually fails — PU is a rational choice, and plenty of good furniture uses it. A raw oil like linseed sits at the other extreme: beautifully natural, but offering little real protection for a hard-working piece.

What we wanted was both — the honesty of oil and the everyday resilience a real home demands. A finish that keeps the wood feeling like wood, protects it against heat and spills, ages gently rather than clouding, and can be repaired at home rather than in a workshop. That's what a modern hardwax oil gives, and it's why we use it on every piece we make.