Wood with a history — inside the home. A table your family will gather around for decades.
Message us on WhatsAppA slab top is a single board 70–110 cm wide. Nothing in furniture moves as much, or fails as disappointingly. An ordinary slab is air-dried for years and still holds moisture inside, which comes out later — by then, in your house. We run the slab through the same chamber as the decking board, and that changes four things.
After modification the equilibrium moisture content falls to 4–6% against 12–15% for ordinary timber, and the board very nearly stops responding to the season. A wide top doesn't bow into a dish in winter or open at the joints in summer — which is how most slab tables made from merely dry timber end.
Water and part of the broken-down hemicelluloses leave in the chamber, and the slab sheds a noticeable share of its mass. A table for six is still carried by two people rather than four, and the base doesn't have to be engineered for the extra tens of kilos.
This is the argument that matters most for a thick slab. Ordinary drying pulls moisture from the surface faster than from the middle: dry on the outside, not in the core. A year or two later the trapped water finds its way out, and you get checks and steps at the glue lines. Thermal treatment takes the whole section through, and the conditioning phase brings the moisture back evenly.
The dark honey and chocolate tone isn't a stain and not a tint. The timber made that color itself at 180–215 °C, and it runs through the full thickness. A scratch doesn't expose a pale interior, and re-working an edge in ten years doesn't leave a light stripe.
Thermal modification lowers impact toughness: the slab is more brittle than the same board untreated. On a tabletop that doesn't matter — it works flat, in bending, resting on a base. We simply don't make anything from thermo-slab that has to take a blow or carry a load in a way that could snap it.
A slab isn't chosen from a catalog. It is chosen in the yard, in daylight, tipped up on its edge — and after that it is yours, even if the table is a month away.
How this works
The slab comes off the same production line and out of the same chamber as the board on your terrace and the batten on your ceiling. So the table in the living room and the decking beyond the glass speak the same language — not "a similar tone", but literally one timber and one schedule.
And for the same reason it can be serviced: an abrasion and oil bring the top back to day one, and we know exactly what is on it, because we put it there.
The sharpest illustration of why a slab wants thermal treatment: a top with a gas trough burning along it all evening, standing outdoors, in winter, and staying flat. An ordinary slab doesn't survive that duty.
Live edge both sides, a gas trough on the axis, a steel base. It stands outdoors all year.
A whole slice across the trunk: the growth rings are the drawing, the checks are filled with resin, and the base is the charred root of the same tree.
A burl edge the full length — a reception counter people notice before the sign.
The electronics are sunk into the solid: technology inside the timber, not sitting on it.
The bench is cut from the same trunk — the figure carries from one piece to the next.
What you're actually paying for: a pattern that can't be ordered twice.
The plane is taken out over the full length — this is what decides whether the table sits without rocking.
Checks and voids are filled with resin: the defect becomes the decision, not the reject.
Several passes to the final grit, then oil. The same product we service terraces with.
Every slab is cut once — there will never be another like it. We choose the cut, run the drying and the finish, and the person making decisions about your table is the same person who answers for the result.
It's the same material language as the terrace: the house speaks it inside and out.
Two edges of one slab opened apart, with black epoxy resin between them. The shape of the river is set by the cut: it can't be drawn in advance and it can't be repeated.
We don't straighten the edge. It is cleaned, stabilised and oiled — the shape stays the one the tree gave it.
The slabs are lying there waiting. You come and choose a particular board — not a catalog reference, but the one that becomes your table.
Come choose your slab in person — warehouse and production in Almaty. Instagram: @slab.kz
A slab isn't a blank off a timber merchant's rack. Four decisions stand between the tree and the table, and every one of them is irreversible.
How the log goes under the saw is a choice of pattern. Cutting lengthwise through the heart gives one figure; cutting to the side gives another entirely. There is no second attempt: a log is sawn once.
The longest and most expensive part. A slab dried fast will warp and split later, in the client's house. We run drying in our own chambers — the same ones where karagach is thermally modified for terraces and facades.
Cracks and voids are either filled with resin, or pinned with butterfly keys, or left exactly as they are if they are part of the board's character. That decision is made with you, not for you.
Oil you can refresh at home, rather than lacquer that has to be stripped off whole. The base is steel from the same team that welds the kitchens: spider legs, a U-frame, or solid timber.
The karagach in a slab is the same material, out of the same chamber, as the boards on your terrace. Which is how a house can speak one language inside and out: a kitchen countertop, a facade, a ceiling, a deck — and the table in the living room.
If you're already building the yard with us, the slab for the table can be chosen on the same visit.
Come choose a slab — or send your room's dimensions and we'll shortlist options.
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