Cordia alliodora
🌳 Common names: Spanish Elm, Salmwood, Nogal Cafetero, Laurel Blanco
🔬 Family: Boraginaceae
🧬 Genus: Cordia
🌍 Origin: Tropical Americas (from Mexico down to Northern South America) A majestic tropical tree with a straight trunk and exquisite timber. Highly prized across the Americas for its natural elegance, effortless workability, and high resistance to pests and fungal decay. It is the pride of high-altitude coffee farms: growing alongside coffee plants, offering essential canopy shade, and yielding a luxury-grade wood.
🔍 Fun facts:
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The Coffee Guardian: In the Colombian Andes, this tree provides vital shade for high-altitude coffee crops. But what few realize is that its wood is just as precious as the coffee it protects: durable, strikingly beautiful, and carrying a subtle, natural forest scent.
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Tropical Elegance: Reaching heights of up to 115 feet (35 meters), it blooms with fragrant white flowers and leathery leaves, thriving in both lowland and cloud forest ecosystems.
Often compared to Spanish Cedar or American Walnut for its rich tones and workability, Cordia alliodora brings something extra to the table: natural oiliness and weather resistance akin to Teak. While known in nautical and luthiery circles for boat decking and high-end acoustic guitars, experiencing it in fine, precision-crafted objects is a rare luxury.
🪵 The Wood
🎨 Color: Light golden-brown to deep chocolate brown, often striped with dark, rich veins.
✨ Texture: Fine, silky, and slightly oily to the touch
🪨 Hardness: Medium (Janka: 870–1,000 lbf)
🪚 Common uses: Fine furniture, guitar making, boat decks, luxury joinery, and custom architectural details This wood is a true gem of the Andean region. It boasts a rich grain, deep color depth, and an agreeable, earthy aroma. It works smoothly, carves beautifully, and finishes into a smooth, silky surface. It’s the kind of wood that wins you over at first touch—effortlessly noble, filling any object with presence and character.
✨ At Holz Haus, we bring this tropical heritage straight to your hands with this Holz Mark… 📚 This Holz Mark isn’t just a bookmark: it’s a story told through grain—a tangible fragment of the rich, shaded forests where South American coffee is born. 💼 Collectible by nature, each piece helps you build your very own xylotheque—a personal, curated collection of real, handcrafted, living woods.
Wood isn't made; it is born. Every piece is unique and unrepeatable: its grain, its color, its texture… No two are ever the same. Holding it is like keeping a treasure from the forest—an object with a soul, rich in nuances that only time and nature can sculpt.