Wood Stains available on Furniture by Comfy 1

To get a better feel for how the various stains look on furniture, we encourage you to look at all the pictures shown of the various models and sectionals in our website, in which the wood stain is usually indicated. And keep in mind that the colors seen on your monitor come across best in a dimly-lit room. Note the following:

1) We have recently changed our standard stains so that the grain shows up about twice as boldly as shown above, but it's still a little less bold than the way you often see oak furniture. If you prefer it no bolder than above, please specify our "old-type stain."
2) We will be adding a new extra-dark walnut stain, a big step darker than the Dark Walnut you see above

First row, left to right:
- Medium Russet (reddish, similar to the way cherry is often finished)
- Dark Russet (deeper reddish, similar to dark-stained cherry or mahogany, especially older mahogany)
- Old Teak (deep orangey reddish brown, blends fairly well with teak that has had a lot of exposure to sunlight)
- Dark Amber (orangey, similar to many woods that have taken on a patina with age, including natural cherry, oak, and stained pine, as well as newer teak and natural-finished mahogany that have not darkened much.)
- Light Amber (similar to natural red oak and lightly-stained pine)
- Blonde (similar to natural white oak that has darkened only a little)

Second Row, left to right:
- Medium Fruitwood (a fairly neutral medium-dark tone, with a very slight reddish tint, compatible with much walnut or walnut-stained wood)
- Dark Walnut
- Old Ivory
- Light Blonde (similar to natural beech or hard maple)
- Golden Oak (slightly golden, and between the blonde and light fruitwood in darkness)
- Light Fruitwood (a rather neutral, light-medium tone with just a hint of reddish)

Please note: The way these stains will appear in your home may be somewhat different from what you see here, for various reasons: (1) differences in computers and differences in settings on your monitor versus ours, (2) the amount of light in a particular place in your home, (3) the kind of light in which the furniture is viewed (incandescent, fluorescent, mid-day sunlight, late-day sunlight, etc.), and (4) how the stain takes on individual pieces of wood, as applied in a hand process. In a low-light setting, furniture with any of these stains will look darker than as seen on this website, or in bright light they would look lighter. If you are particular about the wood color, please (before ordering or when ordering) request sample(s) of whichever one(s) interest you. However, be aware that there will be some variation even between a sample you receive and the actual finished products, given that we are working with real oak wood and with hand-applied stains. If you were to take wood stain samples to real oak wood furniture in stores, and hold them next to different locations on different sides of the same piece of furniture, you’ll almost always find susbtantial variations within the same piece of furniture. Our variation will be less than that of typical furniture, especially where different pieces of wood come together, but there will still be variation. Excellent uniformity of color can be achieved with paint (see below) but not with wood stains on real oak wood.

For our painted finishes, we can use any color of water-based enamel or other water-based paint of your choice. As you see here, we thin it enough to allow not only good penetration into the wood but also allowing the pretty oak grain to show in a subtle way. The light has to be reflecting off the surface of the wood in a certain way for the grain to show up as clearly as it does in this picture. Our normal two coats of polyurethane go on top of the paint, for maximum durability and practicality.

Note the well-rounded edges and corners, which is the way we always do our corners and edges that are exposed to human contact from above or from outside the corner; and compare that treatment (and it's safety, especially with kids) with the relatively sharp corners often found on wood furniture.

To return to our condensed home page, click here

To go to the detailed Comfy 1 home page, to see our various models, quality features, and other details, click here.

Q: Are you looking for a clearer stain than we use, a stain that shows all the detail of the wood grain? Would you like to buy our furniture unfinished and stain and finish it yourself?

A: Response by Comfy 1's owner to such an inquiry: I can see that you have preferences that are different from those of the vast majority of customers we normally deal with. I have long since realized that it's impossible to please everybody and keep your costs at a level that a lot of people can afford, and we have to try to do what most people consider is important. In the case of staining and finishing, what's important to most people is uniformity and avoiding very bold grain, and our stains do that at a cost that's affordable for a lot of people. And they provide the durability that's important to us and to our customers, as opposed to the sprayed-on lacquer stains that are typical. A customer might get better-looking (to her) results with Min-wax or other solvent-based stains, but I've long since rejected solvent-based finishes (see comment about that later).

In addition to typically accentuating the oak grain excessively (for most people), typical stains accentuate color differences and light-dark variation in the wood. I've heard people saying that they like the natural variation in wood, on the basis of their limited previous experience with some wood (probably different from the wood we use -- bearing in mind that there are many variations of oak). Some people think that they would be happier if they were to stain and finish it themselves, thinking on the basis of their previous experience in doing such things. But I have no way of knowing that the natural variation in the wood we provide would be within the range the customer has experienced in the past -- what assurance is there that we won't have an unhappy customer saying, "I didn't have in mind THAT kind of variation." The customer could say that we should have selected the wood better for matching. But we don't have people experienced and skilled at that kind of thing, and it does take a very skilled eye to predict how different stains will come out after application to different pieces of oak. I've long since concluded that we shouldn't try to do something that isn't part of a normal process here, a process that we know we do well enough to satisfy essentially everybody.

Making another sale isn't important enough to us to justify departing from the kinds of routines that I know will almost never fail to satisfy the customer. So, as much as I would prefer to be accommodating on something that sounds as simple as selling our products unfinished, I prefer even more to avoid having to deal with an unhappy customer. If the customer is looking for a kind of staining and finishing that we don't do, or wants a product unfinished, I have to politely decline.

Some people, seeing our prices, think our staining and finishing should be "better" (show the detail of the grain more clearly, be smoother, etc.) than they see in our stain samples. But there are lots of reasons, other than finishing costs, why our prices need to be as high as they are. Spending more on finishing to try to please that last customer out of a hundred would raise the costs to an unaffordable level for many people. And doing finishing differently for different customers (on top of all the other custom work we do) would require added attention that is almost impossible to charge enough for. Solvent-based stains and finishes, which some people like better than water based finishes, are actually about half as expensive as the finishes we use, but there are several good reasons (employee health, pleasantness of work environment, air pollution, fire safety, insurance costs, satisfying the fire inspector) why we don't use them.