Buying guides ·
Sal, sagwan or engineered wood: what should actually be inside your sofa
The frame is the only part of a sofa you can never fix later. Here is what belongs inside one, and what does not.
Why the frame is the only irreversible decision
Fabric can be replaced in year seven for a fraction of the sofa's cost. Foam can be refilled. Legs can be re-polished, mechanisms can be swapped, buttons can be re-tied. The frame is the one component that, once it is wrong, ends the sofa. So if you have limited money — and most people do — spend it here first.
Sal: the correct default in Nepal
Sal is a dense, strong hardwood that grows across the Terai and is the backbone of the Nepali furniture trade. It holds a screw, it holds a tenon, it resists insects reasonably well, and it is available in the sections a sofa frame needs without importing anything. For a sofa frame it is, in almost every case, the right answer.
The critical word is seasoned. Green sal contains a great deal of moisture, and as that moisture leaves the timber the wood moves — it twists, it shrinks away from joints, and the sofa develops a creak that nothing will cure. Timber should sit in a rack for at least a year before it becomes a frame. This is the single largest hidden difference between workshops, because seasoning costs money and space and nobody can see it in the finished product.
Sagwan (teak): beautiful, and often wasted
Sagwan is more stable than sal, naturally oily, extremely durable and considerably more expensive. It is a wonderful wood. It is also, inside a sofa frame, almost entirely wasted, because nobody will ever see it and sal is strong enough for the job.
Where sagwan earns its price is show-wood: carved legs, exposed arms, the visible frame of a traditional carved sofa. There the grain and the finish are the product. Our honest recommendation to customers is sal in the frame, sagwan where the wood shows — and to be suspicious of any workshop that charges a full teak premium for a frame you cannot inspect.
Engineered wood: right in two places, wrong everywhere else
Engineered wood is a broad term covering very different materials, and lumping them together is how customers get misled.
Good marine or BWR-grade plywood is genuinely excellent in specific positions. It does not split, it spreads load across a surface rather than a line, and it does not have a grain direction to fail along. That makes it the correct material for a chaise deck, a seat deck under cushions, and a back panel. We use it in exactly those places and we say so.
MDF and particle board are a different matter. They have almost no screw-holding strength, they swell irreversibly when wet, and a monsoon in Kathmandu is enough to finish them. They belong in flat-pack cabinets, not in anything that carries a person's weight. If you are told a sofa frame is engineered wood, ask specifically which one, and ask to see it.
Joinery matters as much as species
A mortise-and-tenon joint — a tongue cut on one piece, a socket cut in the other, glued and pinned — has enormous surface area and resists twisting in every direction. A butt joint held with staples and a bead of glue has almost none. The same sal timber will produce a twenty-year sofa or a four-year sofa depending purely on how it is joined.
You can check this. Ask to see a bare frame on the workshop floor. Look at the corners: you want visible pegs or bolts and corner blocks, not just staples. Then push down hard on one front corner of the frame and watch the opposite corner. A good frame moves as one object. A bad one racks like a gate.
What to ask, in one sentence
Ask this: which species is the frame, how long was it seasoned, what joinery is used at the corners, and can I see one before it is covered. A workshop that answers all four without hesitation is a workshop worth buying from, whether or not it is ours.
— Written in the workshop. Questions to 9849239091 on WhatsApp.