Kiri: the paulownia chest

Kiri, Paulownia tomentosa, is the lightest of the woods in this index and the strangest in its virtues. A kiri board weighs about 280 kilograms per cubic metre dry, roughly half of hinoki, and yet the Japanese wardrobe chest, the kiri-tansu, has been made from it for centuries to hold what a household valued most: silk, scrolls, the clothes of ceremony.

The wood that guards silk

The old logic holds up under the laboratory numbers. Kiri absorbs and releases little moisture and shows the smallest shrinkage of almost any commercial wood, so drawers keep their fit when the room turns humid. It is slow to catch fire for a wood of its weight, with an ignition point reported around 425 degrees, and it chars rather than blazing through, which is why the chests of old fires are said to have come out blackened with the silk inside intact. When such a chest is sold on today, the dealers who date old chests read the same evidence the file does: wood, joinery, repairs, then price.

Feather-light, and the price of it

The same softness that lets kiri be planed to a whisper-thin drawer side makes it mark at a touch. A fingernail dents it; a chair leg bruises it. It is therefore a case wood, not a floor wood: drawer sides, chests, boxes, the sounding boards of instruments, and the clogs that were once carved from it by the pair. Where hardness matters, the file points elsewhere without apology.

Grain, colour, use

The grain is straight and coarse, the colour a pale grey-brown that deepens gently. It glues and finishes without complaint, and because it barely moves it is a kind wood for beginners to learn on: errors in technique show, but the wood itself does not add its own movement to the problem.

Plantation kiri elsewhere

Paulownia is now planted far outside Japan for fast timber, and plantation stock is lighter still and less durable than the old trees that supplied the chests. The name on a listing is the beginning of the check, not the end of it.

The chest and the drawer

The kiri-tansu is the form the wood was perfected for: a tall chest of deep drawers with iron pulls, built to hold silk and scrolls against the damp that destroys them in any other wood. The drawer sides are planed whisper-thin because the wood permits it; the case is light enough to carry out of a burning house, which is the other half of the old story. A good chest seals so well that opening it after a humid week releases a dry breath, the air of the room as it was when the drawer last closed.

A chest that has kept silk dry for a century has already proven the wood; the buyer's job is only to check that the drawers still seal and the case still weighs almost nothing when empty.

The card, filed

Kiri is a specialist: the wood for what must be kept dry, kept light and kept safe, from the silk chest to the instrument body. It dents because it is soft, and it protects because it is stable. On a floor it is a mistake; inside a chest, there is little better.